The truth is not to be trusted - EVER!

CRL signing but yeah, close enough.

So yes, we are talking about some pretty high-end security there. But when you consider the stakes on the table for the American election system I would argue that the needs for security easily eclipse anything any certificate authority might need... including Verisign and similar companies who "protect" user-level banking.

I bring it up because I fear that someone will make a new, more secure, voting machine with paper trails and lord knows what else and people will think that solves the problem. It doesn't. It won't. It can't until policy & procedure is a part of the solution and that P&P includes serious consideration to internal, well-placed attackers.

Fundamentally, the problem with electronic voting is the potential for a single point of attack and the size of the prize if you succeed. Paper ballots are "more secure" not because you can't cheat that system, but in order to do so you must do it precinct by precinct. That scales up the number of people involved in the crime dramatically thereby reducing the odds that you will keep it all secret. It also scales down the rewards of a successful intrusion to just one precinct rather than an entire state.

In plain English, if you're going to put a lock on a door, it has to cost more to break the lock than the value of the contents protected by it. How, exactly, do you make a lock that is capable of protecting against the value of winning US elections?

Adam B has the same view that most Americans have. There is something that makes them think there is a certain infallibility about computers. A sociological study about American attitudes toward computers and computerization would be a very interesting. I'm beginning to think it is only programmers and software engineers who understand how ridiculously stupid and inaccurate computers are capable of being.

It would be far cheaper to just do manual votes/counting than it would be to do everything you can think of to make electronic voting reliably reflective of the truth. And even when all your herculean efforts are in place, you would still be left wondering what you might have missed.

What gets to me is how obvious some of these electronic shennanigans are YET NO ONE DOES ANYTHING ABOUT IT! What is this sleep state? I guess most of us are too busy trying to pay the bills with too many jobs to even think about it much less research as we political junkies have done. I wonder if some programmers weren't actually trying to alert the public, because of the inelegance of their manipulations; they left glaring clues, but no one acts upon them.

In my state, I recall that when I worked in a public (like a county) computer shop, the election software was sent very hush hush to a single programmer in the house by management for every election. Although most of us were aware, none of us thought to challenge that in the least. I guess we all assumed it was to change the names on ballots only. The room for abuse was astonishing, in retrospect, I recall the tiniest spiderey sense telling me something was wrong with this picture.

Next to the TPP, I consider this the premier issue facing Americans. Citizens United can come behind the integrity of our votes every day of the week.

I want citizen oversight of all elections. Our system is lax only because we trusted it for so long. We believed all Americans believed in voter integrity and voter's rights. We had laws that most people don't know have been overturned by the
corporatist Supreme Court.

Some people have seriously taken advantage of that trust. I'm thinking LTE'S if only because helping awareness is really our only option now as it always has been. Our job is even harder than ever, thanks to the capitulation of all mainstream media to some corporate imperative. Gawd what a horrible loss that has been.