My brother Bill, his wife Emily and my parents visited me in Montreal this weekend. One thing I learned is that both Bill and my Dad pooh-pooh the possibility of elections fraud which is enabled by the shoddy electronic voting machine systems, such as Diebold produces. "If it were a problem, I'm sure the Democrats who lost the election in Georgia would have made a fuss," said Bill, taking the canary in the coal mine argument. "Besides," he went on, "how come I haven't heard anything about it?"
Probably because he largely reads the WSJ -- which hasn't been very interested in it, since as yet there are no provable thefts. But, if history teaches anything on the matter, it is that when people can steal elections, they do. It's merely a matter of time, and so most people will just wait until something so egregious occurs that we can force the companies who make the machines -- who are resisting the calls for minimal and inexpensive protections of our elections -- to actually make those protections.
And here's an article on one such protection: The machines should run on open source -- meaning they publish their computer programs. This allows independent analysis by parties heavily motivated to crack the system -- and to devise protections so that they are secure. "Open source" sounds funny to non-progammers -- like giving away the milk for free -- but programmers know it as the best means to insure bullet-proof programs. Having "competent" programmers go over the code themselves isn't even a close second, as intimated in this article [NYTimes Magazine]
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