Week 12 Writing Assignment

After reading the article, seeing the documentary and watching the video at the Priceton site, I have acknowledged the specific concerns that people have about the Diebold voting machines. In researching Diebold voting machines, it is clear that they are vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. Any attacker that gets physical access to a machine, will only take them a minute to get a hold of the removable memory card which could lead to installing a malicious code. This leads to stealing votes, modifying records, logs, and counters. When watching the video we saw how in Florida, Al Gores votes were counted backwards, which resulted in a Negative number. Computers are supposed to protect the people so the theory of what happened is that it was rigged, as the problem couldn't possibly have just been from the computer naturally. They found a second memory card, which came from an unauthorized source. The reason why these Diebold machines are not being considered secure is for the fact that certain individuals are illegally hacking into the system and messing with the votes. The video introduced us to Bev Harris, who is trying to put a stop to all this madness. She explained how the votes are stored on memory cards which are taken to a master computer, which reads them and declares a winner. However the problem is that we cannot see it counting so we are unsure if the counting is being done correctly. Their are many attributes towards writing software and just one person could change hundreds of thousands of votes, but these companies keep it a secret so all outsiders are prohibited in seeing how it works. Attackers could steal malicious codes that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during the election activities, being a virus.  If I were placed in charge of monitoring elections in California, I would recommend to ensure the process was as far as possible by choosing to go back to the way it was before electronic voting took place. Hopefully in the future electronic voting could again be the new way to vote, but until all the flaws are figured out and it is secure enough, paper ballots seem to be the best bet. "Electronic voting machines are a hacker's dream," as the article states, so the paper ballot system, being untechnical could possibly be the more verifiable way that Americans will proudly be aware that their votes are being counted accurately.