Long-time readers may remember my loathing for voting machines, and that I’d prefer to see a legion of volunteers doing the counting manually. This Politico report changes my opinion not a whit:
“We’re going to wind up with a thousand court cases that cannot just be resolved by just going into the software and checking to see what happened, because it’s proprietary,” said Ben Ptashnik, the co-founder of the National Election Defense Coalition, a bipartisan advocacy group that pushes Congress to reform election security.
In most elections, the intellectual-property laws that surround the machinery of America’s electoral system prove inconsequential in determining who won or lost a campaign, and software isn’t central to most contested-election scenarios, such as late-arriving ballots or issues with access to polling locations. But in instances where the vote tally itself is in question, analysts could need access to voting machines’ underlying code to determine if potential security flaws, errors or even purposeful tampering are behind the irregularities. And this year, with widespread fears of contested ballots, recounts and the potential for weeks of legal challenges that threaten to undermine public faith in the results, those IP laws could prove decisive.
“You know how Apple fights against law enforcement coming in and going into their iPhone software? Well, you’d be in the same position,” said Ptashnik. “You might have to go all the way to the Supreme Court to get permission to get into proprietary software.”
Even if we had access to the hardware and software for full inspection, it’d not really be enough. Proving software is correct is a difficult proposition, and in all likelihood these companies aren’t using languages that lend themselves to automated proofs.
Hardware is it’s own ugly game.
As are backdoors in both realms.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: People are adders, computers are multipliers. Sure, people can be corrupted – but we know, or knew, how to keep a vote uncorrupted. A single counter can only affect a few votes, and a little redundancy will catch them at their game. At higher levels, it’s a matter of keeping an eye on management – and that’s what party lawyers can do.
But it’s a rare party lawyer who can say This machine is miscounting!
