by Paul Murphy
August 27th, 2008 @ 12:15 am

On August 20th of last week someone named Deborah Hastings produced an interesting story under the headline Election loser: touch-screen voting.

I’d quote it, but unfortunately the story is distributed by the Associated Press and they recently made so many announcements and counter-announcements about their own “fair use” policies with respect to copyright that I have no idea what the rules really are for quoting them - a mess, by the way, with its roots in the “fairness doctrine” the democrats want to impose to shut up right wingers like Glen Reynolds; the guy whose efforts to expose news fauxtography and AP’s consistently biased political reporting started them scurrying for legal cover.

So, since I can’t quote her directly, what I’ll do instead is summarize key parts of her report:
1. she talks about state and local governments warehousing tens of thousands of abandoned e-voting machines
2. she quotes San Diego County Registrar Deborah Seiler as saying that the county had spent around $25 million on them, and puts that in the context of a $3 billion dollar federal Election Assistance Commission budget and a cumulative $253 million known to have been spent by 30 states on electronic voting gear.
3. she mentions that one major vendor offered to buy back machines sold for thousands each at one dollar each; and,
4. she lists disappearing votes, hardware and software failures, and concerns about hackers as driving state and county decisions to back off from electronic voting.

The truth is a lot simpler than this - and obvious to anyone with any computing experience at all: the whole e-voting thing has been a disaster because every system deployed uses programmable voting machines and it is not possible to guarantee the integrity of e-voting results obtained using programmable voting stations. This is the fundamental client-server problem: since the client is programmable any expert dragged into court and asked directly whether it would be theoretically possible to cheat has to answer Yes.