Saturday, 08/02/03

There's been this simmering controversy on readily hackable voting machines, since the 2000 election in Florida prompted many state legislatures to trade in their punchcard devices for something with the reassuring capability to beep and whir. To save money, the cheaper electronic voting machines on the market don't produce any hard copy evidence of a vote. Whoever wrote the code running the machine will determine whether votes are counted fairly, or at all.

But of course, most people have no firsthand experience with writing software or designing hardware, so they trust these machines to a vastly greater degree than they deserve. The possibility that voting machines might be compromised, whether through incompetence or design, is too horrible to contemplate. State legislatures are chronically busy and cash-starved, which is the right recipe to try to fix their hanging-chad problems on the cheap.

This story fascinates me because it illustrates a gap in Americans' relationship with technology. The reputation of exit polls is in the doghouse, voting-machine vendors refuse to let their equipment be audited by independent computer-security professionals, and a close election that can't be authoritatively recounted is effectively beyond challenge. I haven't been able to figure out how the general public might come to view insecure voting machines as a threat.

That's why I was so thrilled to see this long NYT story about the unregulated, fly-by-night world of privately-owned ATM machines, friend to money launderer, identity thief, and enterprising workaday criminal alike. It's a great piece of journalism, and it's a wedge issue on voting machines, because Americans take their money seriously.

Banks, of course, would rather lose a few million a year than let the story get out and face a reduction in the billions of dollars they realize in rapacious foreign-ATM fees. If this story or ones like it go wide, the few brave folks working to educate the public about electronic voting machines will get a useful leg up. 02:47PM «

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