Of particular concern are machines that don't provide a paper printout to confirm your choices. According to computer scientist Richard Kemmerer at UC Santa Barbara, "If there's no paper trail, you can have corrupted software display on the screen whatever you want to display, then after the voter leaves, record something completely different inside."
The state of Ohio has become a case study in the problems with digital voting in the Age of the Hacker. Ohio shelled out $115 million in one recent year just to upgrade their software, but the result has been a sharp increase in counting errors and suspicious results. And just as in the 2004 presidential election that came down to Ohio's close vote, critical election records are likely to disappear in cyberspace even though they are required by law to be kept.
As Ohio voters watched live coverage of election returns in November of 2015, they actually saw hundreds of thousands of votes get switched in reports just 11 minutes apart. At one point a ballot measure to legalize cannabis was reported by election officials to have 969,000 "Yes" votes and 512,000 "no" votes. When the next set of numbers were released 11 minutes later, the total of "No" votes increased by 600,000 while the "Yes" votes actually dropped by 350,000.
In the fall of 2007, security researchers from Pennsylvania State University, the University of Pennsylvania and WebWise Security of California were asked to examine Ohio's electronic voting systems. Here's some of what was written in their ï nal report:
"We found vulnerabilities that would allow voters and poll-workers to place multiple votes, to infect the precinct with virus software, or to corrupt previously cast votes -- sometimes irrevocably. Further problems persist at the election headquarters, where election machines could be compromised by viruses arriving from precincts, or by an attacker with seconds at the controller terminal.
"Failures were present in almost every device and software module we investigated. Our review concludes that the systems lack basic technical protections necessary to guarantee a trustworthy election."
So on Election Day we can be grateful we live in Oregon and not in Ohio. We should do the right thing and spread the word all around the country about the joys and benefits of voting by mail. It's election reform at its most basic, and it brings the added benefit of drawing a few more citizens into the experiment in democracy that is America...
Rob Lafferty is a former newspaper editor and National Affairs columnist from Hawaii now living in the woods of Oregon's Coast Range.
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