[SGVLUG] Vote stealing

[Dustin Laurence]

On Tue, Sep 19, 2006 at 11:27:11AM -0700, Emerson, Tom wrote:

> Of course, should a machine be compromised, noone would know UNLESS a
> recount was requested/required, and then it could still come in within
> the "margin for error", and if it does, which way do you think people
> will believe? The machine or fallable humans counting by hand?

The humans, and here's why: the whole reason we like electronic systems
is the ability to have enormous numbers of transactions done very
quickly without human intervention.  Unfortunately, this is exactly the
property you want for cheating as well.  With hand counting, to subvert
large numbers of votes you have to subvert actual humans, and that means
leaving a trail.  Humans can always have an attack of conscience or
foolishness and reveal what they did or saw.  This becomes far more
likely the more people know the secret, and hand counts require many
humans to be involved.

By contrast, a perl script which randomly changes one of every twenty
votes for A into a vote for B never go to the police and can be deleted
after running.

The very thing that makes humans inefficient for information processing
is what we want for voting recounts.

Dustin
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