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Bruce Schneier has an interesting piece on Forbes regarding the 'black box' voting machines. These are voting machines that tally a vote but produce no paper ballot or other physically verifiable record of the vote. His article references literally dozens of other pieces regarding issues with voting machines, and is worth reading on that basis alone. But he also references articles regarding issues with the fundamental flaws in the voting machines, ranging from the procedures used in the operation of the machines to the design of the hardware and software used with the machines. Why am I bringing this up? Several reasons, but the primary one being that our elected officials don't seem to be really interested in addressing the issue. This is our VOTE! This is how we decide who will lead us. This is how we tell our elected officials what we want them to do. When a security expert like Bruce Schneier (and he IS an expert; he designed the BlowFish and TwoFish encryption algorithms) tells us that there are fundamental problems, we might want to consider giving him an ear. This man has forgotten more about security than most of us will ever know. What's truly sad is that the people making the decisions on what equipment to purchase and use don't seem to care. A good friend of mine was invited to participate in the selection process for the voting equipment to be used in Cherokee county Kansas. He was asked to leave the selection board after he started asking too many pointed questions because they didn't want to 'get bogged down in technical issues'. Folks, I don't care what country you live in; if you have the right to vote and your election process is looking at or implementing electronic voting machines, you NEED visibility into the ENTIRE PROCESS. There are simply too many ways to cheat the process if you can't verify every step of it.
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