You’ve probably read about California’s frenzy over whether to start using computerized voting machines. Teams of computer-security experts examined California’s would-be voting system and concluded that attacking it would be quite feasible. State officials disagreed. Sensing that the notion of finding a better answer would require them to actually do their jobs, the officials challenged the security experts’ findings with the age-old technique of denial. “Bah!” they cried. “Those ‘experts’ used very improbable attack methods.” After all, what are the chances that a bad guy could get physical access to the machines clandestinely? Who could even imagine that a malicious user might access and modify the machine’s programs?
Now, you’d think that California—the state that virtually birthed the computer age—would be the absolutely last state to let computers handle something as important as vote-counting. Yes, of course, the memory of the hotly contested and still-disputed 2000 US Presidential election is still vivid, and no one ever wants to hear the phrase “hanging chad” again. But, really, how might computers make elections more reliable? Consider these few examples of the inadvisability of computer-based voting machines. . . .
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