Reply #26: Triad does call its software proprietary, and a trade secret. [View All]

One of their main people, the Rapps, said so in an interview last week.

Virtually all of the companies say that.

But, even if they all opened up their records and showed all their software (open source), it wouldn't be sufficient to stop electronic vote fraud.

1. Scientists like David Dill say it is IMPOSSIBLE to get all the bugs out of software, even after it's been used quite a bit. Voting software is used infrequently, and doesn't have the feedback of the voters to check on its performance. Recounts are rare and highly contested (and in Ohio, there seems to be an interesting dance going on attempting to shield various portions of the evidence like the pollbooks).

2. Scientists also say it's nearly impossible to ferret out insider fraud -- a software programmer employed by the company who inserts a trojan horse or a backdoor at the outset can make sure it's not found.

3. Even if you could have perfectly bugless software and perfectly honest insiders, you have to have 100% pure chain of custody from the time the software is designed to installation to transportation to storage in warehouses to transportation to polling places to use on election day (weeks) to the counting period. Testimony in various states (CA and Texas and GA I know of) shows that voting machines have been stored, with no protection from theft or fraud, in precinct election judges' homes and cars during the course of an election, for example.

It only could take a knowledgeable person a few minutes to insert code that would allow fraud.

It's impossible to know what's on each machine at the time the voter uses it -- you are talking 50,000 or 100,000 lines of code. It's REALLY impossible to know what's going on in the crucial tabulating machines that are housed in central offices, and those often have modems and phone connections and can have their votes altered through the phone lines.

(At least in the case of Diebold, this was documented quickly by a hack test by RABA Technologies in January. Coming in through a modem, they were able to change test election tallies at will and exit without a trace of their visit. Md. computer testers cast a vote: Election boxes easy to mess with," January 30, 2004,
http://www.sunspot.net/news/local/bal-te.md.machine30jan30,0,4050694.story?coll=bal-local-headlines)

Arneback's suit also alleges the possibility wireless modems could be a method of altering votes.

Therefore, I suggest to you that counting votes by nontransparent machines is not appropriate. Counting by watched human beings is. Like Canada. Anything else is just an invitation to new kinds of fraud.