Broken Ballots co-author, Doug Jones interview on the vulnerabilities of today’s voting machines, the newer models available, risks of Election Management Systems, and Internet voting: Douglas Jones on Today’s Voting Machines <read>
Fortunately, Connecticut has avoided the problem of corruption of the EMS by using a separate system from programming elections and using a manual reporting system to accumulate the results at the end of the night. That does not mean our systems are safe from errors, hacking, and fraud. We need audits that subject every ballot to the potential for audit selection, along with audits of the entire system including the accuracy of the results reporting and totaling.
In my opinion, the benefits of the currently available systems are not enough to justify replacing our current optical scanners. In the next few years we will need to replace them. Odds are a that in five to ten years there will be much better systems available at much lower cost. Worth the wait.
We have also wisely avoided the risks of Internet voting.
