philip964 wrote:I long for the days of the paper ballots or punch cards. At least there is a record. With these computer machines anybody under the age of 25 can change the totals.
Even paper ballots can be defeated.
I spent some time, a few years ago, traveling around the ountry teching election districts how to use a variety of electronic balloting devices, from touch screen voting machines to paper ballot counters.
Every one of those machines must be calibrated before use, and practicality demands that calibration be a function performed locally by relatively untrained people. There will always be "technologically advanced" folks around, not necessarily under 25, BTW, who will figure out that a slight miscalibration can be caused on purpose and can be used to "adjust" the results.
Each machine is SUPPOSED to give some sort of record of what it recorded for each voter, so that the voter can check it before actually casting the ballot, as in the first example above, where the votor saw the wrong straight ticket come up over and over. The above mentioned straight party line problem is one instance where it appears that a mis-calibration of the touch screen resulted in a wrong ballot being shown, but in that instance the votoer was paying enough attention to not go ahead and record the vote the wrong way.
Some, even most, of the electronic balloting machines even provide a paper printout of the record of the ballot, if the machine is set to do so. All of the paper ballot counters keep the actual ballots in case of a protest, for a manual count.
It was funny, as I went around the country teaching these classes, how many people wanted to know how easy it would be to fudge the results. Since there are multiple audit trails in every system I am acquainted with, it would be verging on impossible to purposely set a machine to record merely a few votes wrong, most, if not all, votes would be wrong and the resultant skew would be very noticeable.
Also remember that there are supposed to be representatives of both, or several, parties, as poll watchers and judges, which is supposed to guarantee fairness. For one party to successfully change votes would necessarily involve the other party, not impossible, just lower likelyhood.
I was in one county where two sisters had been feuding politically with each other for years. Feelings were so bad between them that they had not spoken to each other in a long time. Each accused the other, during class, of wanting to cheat and being there to learn how to do so.
To post change results in the systems I know of would involve more than just getting into the hard drive and changing some numbers, it would mean recomputing the hash sum and changing that, and defeating the encryption of the on site audit record, and its hash sum and the mutual cross check hash sum, and the off site backup would have to be changed too. Not an easy thing to do even for someone over 25 with much more hacking experience.
So, yes, given my knowledge level and the fact that I was trained to fix such problems, I could set some of the machines a little off so that they would give erronous ballot responses, but if the voters paid attention they would notice their ballots being wrong before casting them, and any machine consistently giving errors would be taken out of service, and its prior results called into question.
And I could do the same with paper ballot counters, and punch card counters, and just about everything except maybe, but only maybe, human ballot counters.