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Comment by sto_hristo | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's just me, but when something like democratic elections for the dominant power of the World are at stake, a voting machine should be made a bit more solid and air tight.

For example, make it read only in a way that no updates and BS can be pushed remotely at anyone's convenience. And if it needs to be updated, have a usb terminal unlocked via a physical key that the officials will have with them. Download an update imagine to any USB, plug it in, et voila. Anything, anything other than live updates will be an improvement.

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These measures are all completely obvious, reasonable, and cheap and easy to implement. So, why do you think they're not being done?

Because vote tampering is a partisan issue.

On the contrary, it's the bipartisan stuff that's allowed to slip past the radar. If there's fire behind this smoke, the GOP insiders aren't going to want to look into it if it means calling attention to what they did in Ohio in 2004.

At this point, having seen so much nonsense and idiocy on all levels and everywhere, i bet my money simply on laziness and stupidity. Guess some boss' favorite play thing has been promoted to project manager, cuz it's trendy, and the people that did the actual work just didn't care beyond the paycheck at the end of the month.

What I want to know is how we're being sold the bill of goods that is touchscreen voting machines.

Even if you start with the best of transparency and integrity, it always seemed like a terrible product-market fit.

Your customers are perpetually underfunded states and counties, who have transient, low-paid staff to actually administer the gear. They are not the sort of audience that's going to say "a big, complex, proprietary, expensive Technology Solution? Where do I sign up!"

We have reasonable "automation friendly" balloting designs-- Scantron style fill-in-the-circle ballots can be quickly machine read, but still manually audited. That feels like the sweet spot-- it fits into tiny budgets, and requires little user or setup training.

So what are they saying to local elections boards to get them on board with touchscreen snafus?

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