This thread has been dormant for a while, but WaPo’s report on a court battle over the vulnerability of electronic voting in Georgia reminded me of it. It sounds like a shining example of why voting machines should be distrusted:
On one side are activists who have sued the state to switch to paper ballots in the November midterm elections to guard against the potential threat of Russian hacking or other foreign interference. On the other is Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who has declared the electronic system secure and contends that moving to paper ballots with less than two months to Election Day will spawn chaos and could undermine confidence among Georgia’s 6.8 million voters.
Kemp, a Republican endorsed by President Trump — and an outspoken critic of federal election security assistance in 2016 — is running for governor in a competitive, nationally watched race against a Democrat who could become the nation’s first black female governor.
And so Kemp cannot admit to a mistake, because that’s not the Trump way. On the other side are the technologically literate:
Logan Lamb, a cybersecurity sleuth, thought he was conducting an innocuous Google search to pull up information on Georgia’s centralized system for conducting elections.
He was taken aback when the query turned up a file with a list of voters and then alarmed when a subsequent simple data pull retrieved the birth dates, drivers’ license numbers and partial Social Security numbers of more than 6 million voters, as well as county election supervisors’ passwords for use on Election Day. He also discovered the server had a software flaw that an attacker could exploit to take control of the machine.
And then he found the server was vulnerable, and then the folks responsible for it did nothing about the problem. Clusterfuck city, sounds like.
Well, I know which I’m on – dump the fucking computers. Chaos? Maybe. Discourage voters? I doubt it. They can suck it up, so long as the polling places are run in a fair manner. But the computers are turning out to be potentially even less fair and trustworthy than those darn humans.
So perhaps the humans should run their own damn affairs for themselves for a change, rather than depending on us damn computers.
Think of it that way, eh?
