Las Vegas Slots Versus Electronic Voting Machines

Cute graphic, but a bit misleading. Debra Bowen, the Secretary of State of California, teamed up with the University of California in 2007 to test electronic voting machines and generally found that they were stuffed to the gills with vulnerabilities — weak cryptography, failure to prevent people from voting multiple times using certain methods, and the like. However, these vulnerabilities apparently stemmed from simple incompetence and laziness rather than malice. Cryptography is a difficult thing to program, especially good crypto, so EVM makers resorted to using shortcuts. Vulnerable is still vulnerable, but this infographic seems to suggest there are shady background deals going on for YOUR VOTES made all the more impenetrable because the machines are ELECTRONIC, OH NO!

This article: [[ http://www.usenix.org/events/sec07/tech/wagner.pdf ]] explains the vulnerabilities found in a few commonly used voting machines, or you can read the reports yourself at [[ http://www.sos.ca.gov/voting-systems/oversight/top-to-bottom-review.htm ]]. The latter goes in to much more detail but you probably need to be trained in Computer Science to understand a lot of it. Good for tech wonks.

California basically uses the VVPAT (Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail) system, which relegates EVMs to glorified ballot printers. You punch the button, it prints out your ballot choices, which you read, and then put in the ballot box for someone to count manually, the idea being that it’s harder to falsify a paper trail than electronic data. (This means all of the voter fraud that happens can only be the old-fashioned kind, which is still a problem, but hey, at least it’s easier to prosecute.) Many other states use this system as well, though I don’t have statistics about how many. Check with yours!

Short version: graphic is misleading and suggests malice when the reality is merely incompetence and laziness.