We've struggled with issues of how the nation casts its votes since the 2000 presidential election, during which a few anomalies and a particularly close vote count allowed the election's loser (and yes, I do mean Al Gore -- read your Constitution for details) to cast doubts upon the integrity of the punch card systems that had been standard for decades in many regions of the country.

Optical scanners and computerized systems were presented as "the answer" to election integrity -- but over the last six years there have been concerns raised over the "black box" systems. Now, even the optical scanner systems have been cast into doubt.

Florida's optical scan voting machines are still flawed, despite efforts to fix them, and they could allow poll workers to tamper with the election results, according to a government-ordered study obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.

At the request of Secretary of State Kurt Browning, a Florida State University information technology laboratory went over a list of previously discovered flaws to see whether the machines were still vulnerable to attack.

"While the vendor has fixed many of these flaws, many important vulnerabilities remain unaddressed," the report said.

The lab found, for example, that someone with only brief access to a machine could replace a memory card with one preprogramed to read one candidate's votes as counting for another, essentially switching the candidates and showing the loser winning in that precinct.

"The attack can be carried out with a reasonably low probability of detection assuming that audits with paper ballots are infrequent," the report said.

So, what is the solution? Do we rely on these new technologies, despite the flaws? Do we return to the punch cards, which had a relatively low error rate and are relatively easy to use? Or do we go back to hand-counted paper ballots, eschewing the technological fixes but introducing the element of human error?

No system is perfect, no system is fraud-proof, and no system will satisfy everyone. The question therefore becomes "which one will be seen as conferring the greatest legitimacy on the results?"

Posted by: Greg at 12:13 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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