Reply #6: Digital voting fears are grounded in facts

[MelissaB]

Digital voting fears are grounded in facts

I wanted to comment on two articles I have seen on your Web site, both concerning the WINVote machines specifically and paperless electronic voting in general.

The first, "Voter paper trail might be a blind alley," contains a relatively standard defense of paperless machines from Registrar Randall Wertz, based on security steps the state and localities take against tampering.

All of these steps are useful and necessary, but in the grand scheme they are nothing more than a sugar pill. The software that collects and tallies votes is complex, written to meet poor standards and has a history of failure. We, as computer scientists, know how to write good code -- it runs our airplanes, our pacemakers and our military equipment -- but we don't know how to do it on the cheap. Boeing spent $2 billion over five years to write the control software for the 777, and the final product contains less than one-fourth of the total amount of software that runs on your voting machines.

If airplane code were written to the same standards of reliability as voting machines, every day about 10 planes flying out of Baltimore/Washington International would experience a software failure during flight.


More: http://www.roanoke.com/news/nrv/columns/forum/wb/wb/xp-43263