Hacking Electronic Votes--FOR GOOD

Afraid there won't be a fair election, because electronic voting machines will be hacked? There's hope...

Programmers tend to be more educated and more progressive, which means that Democrats and other progressives could turn out to be the ones hacking voting computers--with votes for Kerry.

It's the opposite of what most people feared--but it is what the Republicans fear--they just haven't talked about it because they don't want to give anybody ideas.

I'm not condoning vote hacking--I think it's wrong no matter who does it or what it's for. It goes against the idea of "one person, one vote" which is central to voting and democracy.

But the idea of progressive hackers making sure regressive hackers aren't tampering for Bush is something we can hope is a reality.

Now--these electronic voting machines are, in principal, a good idea. But they're poorly and insecurely executed, and they have no paper trail. Here's some background:

Electronic touch-screen voting machines are just computers. As you sit at your computer and read this, just remember how much trouble you have with your own computer. How often it refuses to do what you want, or freezes, crashes or loses your data.

Now, imagine trusting the future of your country to a lot of unlireable machines. And--remember that these voting computers are newer, they're the V 1.0 of voting computers, so imagine how many bugs they still have.

In fact, many groups have pointed out the bugs in these systems--not the least of which that they are insecure, easily hacked, and that they have no paper trail. That's like putting your most precious data on your computer with no backup copy and no printout. Not very smart.

And to make it dumber, these machines and the servers they work with have backdoors that allow them to be accessed--and maniplated, by people outside the election office. There are already clear cases of this kind of remote vote tampering taking place.

And they lack paper trails. Simple receipts that show you how you voted, and provide a tangible paper trail that's impossible to "hack." The companies that make these voting machines make other machines, ATMs, machines at colleges that let you pay for your lunch, credit card machines. Every single machine these companies make create a receipt--except the voting machines! That's right, if you go in and spend 59 cents for coffee in a cafeteria, they can give you a receipt, but your priceless vote somehow isn't valuable enough to merit one.

So while progressives fear that electronic voting machines won't accurately tally the votes, there's hope that progressive hackers will make sure they do.

For more information about electronic voting machine issues:

Black Box Voting The definitive site about electronic voting machines and their flaws

Verified Voting Championing reliable and verifiable elections