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by James Robertson.
Original Post: The supposed issues with e-voting
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Part of the problem arises from the complexity of e-voting systems. The code that makes up these systems is so large that there's no efficient way for election officials to ensure that it's free of malware or to completely debug it, according to testimony Johns Hopkins University professor Avi Rubin gave before the U.S. Election Assistance Commission this spring
Complexity? Seriously, how complex should a system like this be? It's an automated multiple choice list. If the people writing such systems made them complex, then find better developers. Seriously, this doesn't even begin to be a complex domain problem. As to security, that's mostly an issue of separating the systems from public (net) access, and verifying that only authorized staff has back end access. In other words, problems we know how to solve. Then there's this:
If you thought pregnant chads in the 2000 election were bad, wait until you see what a determined hacker could do to the democratic process this fall. That is, of course, if we're lucky enough to detect the attack.
What, this columnist has never heard of ballot box stuffing? I'll refer her back to the history of Tammany Hall in New York - this sort of system is no more (but also no less) secure than any other system out there.
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