Reply #14: Harri Hursti is a circus act. [View All]

I think we are so far past the question of "can these machines be hacked?" that presenting it from this angle only invites less informed people to imagine some sort of secure electronic system might be possible, or at the other extreme, demand such things as 100% hand counted ballots.

Confused election officials (and God knows there are many of them!) who haven't yet recovered from the disastrous phase out of old systems will throw up their hands in terror at the mention of hand counts and will run right into the waiting arms of electronic voting machine vendors.

You have to look at vote counting as a process, and look for the weak points in that process. The fact that these machines can be hacked by Harri Hursti is just one of many weak points in this process, and in my opinion it is not the most important one. Harri Hursti sorts of hacks can be readily dismissed in the minds of election officials who might think "Well, okay, I'll keep hackers away from my machines" even though that idea is nonsense.

It is much more difficult to dismiss the protection of a very secure and statistically solid audit.