Reply #29: Paper Ballot fraud [View All]

[flashsmith]

Of all the ideas I've seen so far, the one I like best is for a computer to generate a paper ballot, and then a voter examines and then puts the ballot in a ballot box. But then I am unfamiliar with all the ways fraud is committed with paper ballots. Your always hearing about fraud in countries that use paper ballots, but I've never seen details. Anyone have a list? I assume the computer would print a hash code on the ballot so alteration could be detected, but what are all the other ways?

BTW, I've been programming computers since 1969 and over that time I've made many a blunder that passed though the Quality Assurance team with flying colors. In my mind, it's simply impossible to find all the errors without the source code. If the code is complex enough, it's impossible to find all the errors with or without the source code. So I have no faith whatsoever in any certification process and I don't think anyone else should either. If I knew the source code was going to be kept secret, it would be a piece of cake to put in any backdoor I wanted and have it pass QA. If the source code was going to be public, I would probably deliberatly oversubscribe some array to change a voting variable without being obvious about it. If found, it would just look like a bug.

BTW2. I went to a "Meet the Candidates" event and asked the panel about their thoughts on black box voting. Got the blankest stares I've ever seen in my life. Some work needs to be done in educating the politicians.