Jophiel wrote:
Lesson #1: Don't use a shoe box for your ballots. Believe it or not, a solid metal lockbox* isn't easily damaged by "dropping, spilling, rain, sleet, snow, cold, heat, etc" Problem solved!
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*In the interest of disclosure, I'll note that we used a cardboard box to transport the ballots at the end of the day but that was after the machine had printed out three copies of the scanned results. One copy went right into the hands of the county officer who was waiting for us to close the machine, one copy was posted at the polling place and one copy went with the ballots. The ride to the town hall would have been the worst time to try to tamper with the physical ballots.
Uh huh...
And the box folks drop their ballots into? Is it a solid metal "lockbox" or a cardboard box with a slot cut in the top?
You're also missing the point. I said between the actual voting location (ie: where the voters drop their ballots into the box) and where they are tallied (ie: the machine that spits out the three copies of the scanned results you mentioned). Some sites do the tallying right there, many do not. In either case though, the box moves from where the voters put the ballots into the box, to some other location (may just be a back room of the polling place, or another location entirely), where they're dumped out, fed through a machine and tallied. Then the box is re-filled and they're sealed and sent to a central housing area and stored in case of a recount.
My point is that this process right now is less secure and more susceptible to tampering then any electronic replacement. The scanning machines are just as likely to be tampered with whether they're reading pieces of paper, or data on a storage device.
More to the point, it's vastly easier to arrange to get "your guys" into the tallying areas (or handling the boxes between the voting and tallying areas) in order to stuff the box(es). All you need is the right people in the right places. A handful of extra ballots dropped into each box worth at the tallying station can easily add an extra 5 point margin for your candidate. All it requires is someone with the ability to carry something in their hands, or enough money to pay off the 2 or 3 people involved, or just the one person who's in charge of scheduling the counters.
There are just so many ways to stuff ballot boxes it's not even funny. There's only really two ways to tamper with the electronic system. You have to either tamper with every single voting machine in the country and manage to program it to put extra votes for your guy onto their memory cards (very very hard to do without being incredibly obvious, and hard to do anyway given the volume of voting machines involved), or somehow hack the counting machines themselves to incorrectly report the tallies on the cards.
The first method would be "clean" but despite claims is virtually impossible to do on any sort of large scale and not get caught. Every machine would have to be physically re-programmed before each election to make this work.
The second method is easier, since it could be done on a site by site basis. However, it's still much much much easier to simply stuff a traditional paper ballot box. You'd need to reprogram a much more complicated system *and* you'd have to also change the data on the card (or you'd leave an obvious trail). Most scenarios talking about how to "hack" an election require some sort of methodology to gain read-write access to any given card and change its contents. That's doable, but you're far less likely to avoid being spotted hooking cards up to a laptop you brought along and twiddling bits, then you are just dropping extra ballots on a table (or swapping boxes).
I suppose you could swap memory cards, but that's still exactly as likely as swapping ballot boxes. With the exception that the very "proprietary" nature of the voting machines means that there are checksum matches done to verify that the card being read is the correct card. Not so much with ballot boxes. Since you've worked elections before you know that the ballots and the boxes are made en-mass prior to the election, stored in huge warehouses with literally hundreds of random volunteers handling them. It's pretty trivial to grab a pallet full of folded boxes and ballots and then use them wherever you want. It's a heck of a lot harder to get your hands on properly initialized and checksummed memory cards for electronic voting machines.
I've done a considerable amount of research on this subject. Yes. The electronic voting machine system isn't "perfect", but in every single way it is more secure then the traditional paper ballot system.
Oh, well if YOU say so... 