The JET engine is not the real problem... (Score 3, Insightful)

Back in 1995 I came in touch with the JET engine for the first time. It was used in a database application for a commercial aircraft carrier (!) Databases were corrupt all the times. It was obvious that the technology was a mess. At that time, much better alternatives were available for a little more $$. Hence I could not understand why anyone would spend time and money with such broken technology.

Now we see the use of this technology again, and in an application that is crucial to the future of the U.S and to the future of many other countries... the same mistakes are being made again.

But that is not the real problem. Yes, we know that electronic voting machine manufacturers have a long record of being lazy, careless, and incompetent. The actual problem is with the opinion of the decision makers in the administration and with the opinion of the public. Information technology is widely accepted as a means to make collecting, sorting, and counting, of numbers, names, addresses, etc. more reliable and more efficient. So why not use it also to collect and to count voter ballots?

There is this subtle difference between paper and electronic storage. If you write something on a paper or make a hole, then it will be very difficult and time-consuming to remove the writing or the hole. In any case, too much work to alter ballots in significant numbers! And, if you still do, you leave a trace to be discovered by the forensic experts. In contrast, the information stored on a hard disk, in a flash ram, or transferred via network, can be altered very quickly and, if done well, without leaving any trace. Hence it is by nature that electronic voting machines are insecure and unreliable.

Badly designed and badly implemented electronic voting machines just add up to the insecurity and the lack of reliability that this technology has by its virtue. On the other hand, measures like paper audit trails are certainly very helpful, but these are mere attempts to improve a technology that is bad from the outset.

Looking at people's difficulties in understanding and dealing with today's computer security threats, I guess that it will take a lot of time until the aforementioned difference is in the heads of majority of the public and of those involved in the voting process. In the meantime, we will have many more "voting machine news": For every major election where electronic voting machines will be used, there will be stories about malfunctioning machines, missing audit trails, about elections being stolen, and so on. This is the wrong approach to "strengthen the democratic tradition".

My credo is that running a democracy has a prize that is called "counting by hand".