Insecure Touchscreens in Sarasota, Newton, Clinton, Keokuk
The 18,000 missing votes in Sarasota, Florida resulted in a study of the voting machines that was released this week. It say the machines are “terribly insecure“. Iowa uses similar machines in Emmett, Calhoun, Clayton, Clinton, Fayette, Jasper, Johnson, and Lee counties.
Commenting on the report, computer scientist Ed Felton of Princeton says:
Experience teaches that systems that are insecure tend to be unreliable as well — they tend to go wrong on their own even if nobody is attacking them. Code that is laced with buffer overruns, array out-of-bounds errors, integer overflow errors, and the like tends to be flaky. Sporadic undervotes are the kind of behavior you would expect to see from a flaky voting technology.
Missing votes may be in our future, too, if we continue to use tally our votes on touchscreens.