The problem with voting machines is so much deeper than 'hacking the machine'. It's a matter of trust of the code and perhaps more importantly, all of the peopl

The problem with voting machines is so much deeper than 'hacking the machine'. It's a matter of trust of the code and perhaps more importantly, all of the people and process that are involved in the software, hardware, and running the actual election. Is the source open, and has it been audited? Has the tool chain been audited (eg: the attack described in Reflections on Trusting Trust [1])? Are they using reproducible builds[2]? This includes not just the software loaded on the machine itself, but the tallying software used to count all the results. Even if you can verify the code contains nothing like a "defeat device" [3] (eg: detect it's actually election day and only then enable vote-stealing mode), how do you know what's actually being used? How does a voter verify that the build running on the machine is actually valid and the expected one? Even if the voter has to trust the people running the election, how do those people verify it? If all the polling stations load software onto the machines on election day (to ensure it's the right software), that opens up the possibility of someone injecting their own bad software. If they have to rely on a central organization loading the machines, there's a whole delegation of trust happening and being concentrated in one place -- easier to verify, in some ways, but also easier to compromise. So the only way to run a valid contest is to provide access to the entire process. Can I modify the software used to tabulate? Can I act like I working at the company providing the software/hardware and have access to the code, build process and signing keys? If that's possible, and you can still detect cheating, then that's great, but I also fear it's an arms race with no end, and it's just a matter of one-upping the other side. [1] https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomp... [2] https://reproducible-builds.org/ https://reproducible-builds.org/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defeat_device https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defeat_device