No electronic system is reliable enough to be trusted for voting.
Did anybody see those paper ballots in Florida called "Butterfly Ballots"? That tricked thousands of people into voting for some obscure candidate rather than for Gore? It was obvious and blatant when it was shown on TV. Although the Supreme Court ultimately ruled against Gore, and Gore was honorable enough to accept the court's decision without further ado about it, still at least everybody got to see the evidence of what had been done. And at least there were physical ballots that could be recounted, hanging chads and all. There was evidence that could be taken into a courtroom.
When an electronic system records the wrong result, what recourse is there?
In this case the display allowed the voter to see what was happening and the voter was sufficiently alert to report it. Apparently 20 earlier voters had missed it.
If a machine is deliberately rigged to miscount the tally under the covers, rather than openly displaying and recording inaccurately, then nobody would be able to see what was happening and there would be no obvious printed evidence trail. True you could go back and test the machine, IF you got to it before whoever had deliberately misprogrammed it got back to remove the evidence by swapping out the malign software. If, say, only 10% of the voting machines in a swing county in a swing state are rigged in this way, that could affect the election results and still leave plausible deniability.
It's incredible that people have allowed machines like these, that produce no paper trail, ever to be used. Worse, I even hear people suggest that they want to be able to cast their votes over the Internet! It boggles the mind. If your home PC, your cell phone, and self-driving cars can be hacked, where do people ever get the naive idea that electronic voting can be made safe and reliable? Of course I've worked with computers most of my life so this is obvious to me, but I would think it would not exactly be an esoteric obscure revelation requiring cabalistic insight.
Hacking Voting Machines – Politico article
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/2016-elections-russia-hack-how-to-hack-an-election-in-seven-minutes-214144
... Princeton professor Andrew Appel ... is part of a diligent corps of so-called cyber-academics—professors who have spent the past decade serving their country by relentlessly hacking it. Electronic voting machines—particularly a design called Direct Recording Electronic, or DRE’s—took off in 2002, in the wake of Bush v. Gore. For the ensuing 15 years, Appel and his colleagues have deployed every manner of stunt to convince the public that the system is pervasively unsecure and vulnerable.
Beginning in the late '90s, Appel and his colleague, Ed Felten, a pioneer in computer engineering now serving in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, marshaled their Princeton students together at the Center for Information Technology Policy (where Felten is still director). There, they relentlessly hacked one voting machine after another, transforming the center into a kind of Hall of Fame for tech mediocrity: reprogramming one popular machine to play Pac-Man; infecting popular models with self-duplicating malware; discovering keys to voting machine locks that could be ordered on eBay. Eventually, the work of the professors and Ph.D. students grew into a singular conviction: It was only a matter of time, they feared, before a national election—an irresistible target—would invite an attempt at a coordinated cyberattack.
The revelation this month that a cyberattack on the DNC is the handiwork of Russian state security personnel has set off alarm bells across the country: Some officials have suggested that 2016 could see more serious efforts to interfere directly with the American election. The DNC hack, in a way, has compelled the public to ask the precise question the Princeton group hoped they’d have asked earlier, back when they were turning voting machines into arcade games: If motivated programmers could pull a stunt like this, couldn't they tinker with the results in November through the machines we use to vote?
This week, the notion has been transformed from an implausible plotline in a Philip K. Dick novel into a deadly serious threat, outlined in detail by a raft of government security officials. “This isn’t a crazy hypothetical anymore,” says Dan Wallach, one of the Felten-Appel alums and now a computer science professor at Rice. “Once you bring nation states’ cyber activity into the game?” He snorts with pity. “These machines, they barely work in a friendly environment.”
The powers that be seem duly convinced. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson recently conceded the “longer-term investments we need to make in the cybersecurity of our election process.” A statement by 31 security luminaries at the Aspen Institute issued a public statement: “Our electoral process could be a target for reckless foreign governments and terrorist groups.” Declared Wired: “America’s Electronic Voting Machines Are Scarily Easy Targets.”
... and so on
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