> I'm so sick and tired of stories like this framing the issue of election security as a software issue or hardware issue. Election security is certainly more

> I'm so sick and tired of stories like this framing the issue of election security as a software issue or hardware issue. Election security is certainly more than software or hardware. But I'm sick and tired of jurisdictions that permit paperless votes, because by definition they are insecure. > You can mitigate software flaws with chains of custody, tamper proof seals, bipartisan poll watchers, bipartisan election judges, and enough transparency. Not true; none of these mitigations work. If the software is malicious, it can receive one input and produce a different result. Reviews of source code and even machine code are not enough, because you don't get adequate confidence that what was reviewed is what was run. "Tamper proof" seals don't help, because the malicious code could have been what's installed in the first place, and hardware can easily report "what you expect to see" while running something else in practice on election day. In most cases the source code isn't even available for public review & scrutiny, so there's no possibility of enough transparency even if you could somehow be assured of what code was run. When I was a kid I liked to do magic tricks. I bought cheap plastic devices that looked like they did one thing, but in actuality did something else. Modern DRE systems are just a magic trick device - they'll do something, but not necessarily what you think they do. > Most election systems in the United States employ all of these controls, which is why you have few stories of legitimate votes being discarded due to software failure or tampering. You hear few stories because there is no effective logging, and therefore no way to report failure or tampering. > If your argument is that paper ballots are more auditable or harder to hack, they are not. The same access controls above can be applied to paper, and paper is always susceptible to being destroyed, lost, or conveniently found in a clutch race. Paper ballots are subvertible, but because they are physical items someone has to physically be there to do the manipulation. There's also a long history with paper ballots, so the ways they can be subverted are known - as are their countermeasures. > Hackable machines are a problem, but they are not the only problem. ... It's true that these machines are not the only problem, but voting systems are systems. For voting systems to be legitimate we must address all parts. Direct Recording Equipment (DREs) subvert the entire voting system, and thus should never be allowed to be part of one.