The machine and ballots are tied together right there. I really like the system as if all else fails you can get a paper trail and I belive even ID machines.
Also, they could have granted long term contracts to existing suppliers, don’t have a budget to replace existing machines, don’t want to make the person who bought them look bad, or even possibly don’t want to say the old machines are bad because it calls into question the integrity of past elections.
And even then, you need to trust the machine. In many cases, these machines are using terribly old processors (sometimes even using the venerable 68000), and building a corrupted clone could probably be something doable.
The corrupted processor may have a different behavior, depending on the situation, such as the exact time of operation (ie. it would not be detected by random tests before or after an actual vote), or the analysis of people voting (ballot might be modified only during peak hours, to limit detection)
I'm baffled to see that democracies still engage in electronic voting systems.
At the end of the day, it even goes further than that -- you have to trust the people who build the machines.
Ken Thompson said it best in his Turing Award talk: https://www.archive.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p7...
Because it's open sourced, we can be virtually certain that it's not built into the software, and if it is you need to prove it. Which would fix it, or obsolete it.
Someone will have to ask the security detail handling custody, or one of the other thousands of people who could potentially be involved in trying to rig an election.
It's finally cheap enough to have the transformation of it, from raw compounds into an engineered SoC for tallying votes, livestreamed 24/7 and operated by openly auditable robots.
Convince me that would cost more than one fighter jet.
> The ballot-counting equipment is part of a broader redesign of Los Angeles County’s voting system, which will include new equipment while relying on a traditional paper ballot
Article is light on details, and it's difficult to tell exactly what this sentence means, but if it means the new software will produce paper ballots that can be verified and observed by humans, that's a good thing at least.