Reply #13: Maryland-Avi Rubin...Op-Ed piece in Baltimore Sun

[stillcool]

Flawed election machines leave Maryland voters guessing
By AVI RUBIN
Originally published February 15, 2006

Maryland has adopted a technology for voting that makes it impossible to audit the results of elections, makes it impossible to perform recounts when races are close or controversial and makes it possible for manufacturers to rig the results without risk of detection.
No voting system is less transparent than a direct recording electronic (DRE) system.

One of the weaknesses of Maryland's voting machines is the lack of any kind of verification by the voter that his or her vote was recorded correctly. A rigged or buggy electronic machine can display one thing to the voter and record the opposite.

Since ballots are secret, there is no way that anybody can ever tell if a machine makes a mistake or cheats. The machines must be completely trusted. They must be trusted not to fail, not to have been programmed maliciously and not to have been tampered with at any point before or during the election.

The defenders of the DREs do not account for the ease with which a malicious programmer could rig an election. It is much easier to hide malicious code in software than it is to detect it. Without an external check on the system, a fully electronic voting machine cannot be properly audited.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.voting15feb15,0,5769724.story?coll=bal-oped-headlines

Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science and technical director of the Information Security Institute at the Johns Hopkins University, is the author of "Brave New Ballot: The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting." His e-mail is [email protected].