Saturday, February 25, 2006
More than one kind of security: voting machines
Either you can trust the records from a voting machine or you can't.
The activists at Black Box Voting took a look at the logs of some Florida voting machines from 2004. You might think they could have done this earlier. You might think these were public records that the public should have prompt access to. That's what the judge thought who ordered Florida to turn over the records after two years of stonewalling.
If the logs are correct then someone added votes to several of the machines with time stamps in October.
I can think of two or three ways that could be an innocent screwup. None of them leave me any confidence in the administration of the machines or in the audit trail they produce.
Florida's election officials have said that the records in the logs are wrong. Here's the central logical problem: if we can't trust the audit records how the hell can we trust the same machines to report election results?
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The activists at Black Box Voting took a look at the logs of some Florida voting machines from 2004. You might think they could have done this earlier. You might think these were public records that the public should have prompt access to. That's what the judge thought who ordered Florida to turn over the records after two years of stonewalling.
If the logs are correct then someone added votes to several of the machines with time stamps in October.
I can think of two or three ways that could be an innocent screwup. None of them leave me any confidence in the administration of the machines or in the audit trail they produce.
Florida's election officials have said that the records in the logs are wrong. Here's the central logical problem: if we can't trust the audit records how the hell can we trust the same machines to report election results?
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