This isn’t a business rant, except that businesses seem perfectly happy to sell their services in undermining the democratic process.

This video of a congressional oversight witness testifying that he actually wrote vote machine tampering software for a congressman in 2000.

Those of us who care about vote tampering have known for a long time that there’s no way to secure electronic elections. In fact, in the video, the witness says that the only way to make sure voting machines were accurate is to review the source code.

Actually, even that isn’t good enough. A good programmer can design an algorithm that will do the required tampering as a by-product of seemingly necessary code. An even better programmer can hide the code completely in a way that is completely, utterly undetectable even by a very, very careful source code review.

In short, voting machines aren’t secure unless they’re backed up by a complete paper trail that is independently tabulated. And if we’re going to back them up with an independently counted paper trial, why not just use paper ballots to begin with?

… and by the way, if your business engages in such shinanegans, shame on you. You have the ability to do business in this country only because the system has worked to provide the world’s most stable economic development platform. If you’re tampering with that out of greed, you don’t need more money, you need a good ten years in therapy for sociopathic behavor …

Posted by Stever in Misc