Perhaps a more concrete example, less shrouded in the world of technology, can expose just how intentionally misleading Avante’s argument is. Suppose your home is located in a high-theft area. You investigate the possibilities for some security and discover that the various burglar systems can wire your house and connect you to the police station, thereby reducing the risk of theft by 65% (I’m making these numbers up just to illustrate a point). Why can’t we get better than a 65% risk reduction, you ask. Well there’s no such thing as 100% security: a smart thief can find a way to deactivate the system, but having these securities in place, you are told, will deter the theft 65% of the time. If you want additional security, have your neighbors check on your house when you’re away—that’s always a good low tech way of providing additional security.
Mr. and Mrs. Avante homeowner would say, forget it. If we can’t have better than a 65% shot at preventing theft to our home, then we don’t want any alarm system at all. We’ll just leave our home totally exposed and have faith that things will be OK somehow. Clearly this all or nothing position is nonsensical and yet this is precisely the position argued by Avante in support of its claim that NY’s Law, requiring some security that the voting systems aren’t faulty or rigged by having the source coding that might reveal same archived with the SBOE, should be eliminated so as to require no source code escrowing at all.
In the world of computers, be they voting or any other type, there is no such thing as 100% security. No such technology exists (which by the way is precisely why we need our neighbors to check: check on our house in the above analogy, or check that the computer properly counted the votes by a partial hand-count on election night). While there is no such thing as tamper-proof software, there are things that can be done to make our voting computers less insecure. Providing open source software is a start. That way others can see the defects in the system’s design or view the intentional codes put in to rig an election (open source soft code would be open to the public and therefore would not need to be escrowed with the SBOE).
Avante doesn’t want us to see how it has designed its voting computer to process and count our votes. If it did it would have used open source software, but it chose not to. It is only those vendors who choose to use secret proprietary source code that are required to escrow same so that at least the SBOE can see what is otherwise concealed from the public.
Having chose to use secret software to process and count the votes, which Avante cannot fully escrow because they relied on Microsoft software to create its voting system, Avante now argues that since Kodak or some other hardware supplier isn’t going to give you the source code of the firmware for its scanners or printers either (it would be good to see this lower level firmware coding, but not nearly as important as seeing the software source code for the operating and tabulating functions of the computer), out should go the proverbial baby with the bathwater (and any ability to view the way the computer is programmed to tamper or not tamper with the vote).
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