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November 22, 2004
Diebold, May You Never Die Boldly
Remember that part of the Founding Father's brilliance in how they arranged our three-branch governmental structure is revealed as men try to grab more and more power. By divvying up things between three branches, power was spread out in an fashion that is as irrevocably decentralized as is possible in this world.
Recall to mind too that in designing secure systems and networks, heterogeneous networks are more stable and secure than homogenous networks, on the principle that they are simply more complex and thus harder to crack and take down.
Let's apply those two points now to the current debate about how the US conducts elections. You have quotes like these:
A key problem is the lack of a unified voting system for the nation, the legacy of a patchwork of balloting technologies, regulations, partisan bickering and litigation.from a recent Wired New article entitled Reports of Muddled E-Voting and a couple more. Makes you wonder if voting software falls into the category of .
Now, I'm no Schneier, though given the clear thought in his article on this issue I'd like to be like him some day. And I'm no Diebold fanboy--in fact, I'm pretty sure there's a special place in hell for corporate officials who corrupt social institutions like suffrage. But on the flip side, it seems to me that an unrecognized strength of the current US voting system lies in its heterogeneous, state- and precinct-determined balloting systems. We have, in simultaneous use, ATM, touchscreen, computer-scanned, lever-style, and GOF (good old-fashioned) hand-counted paper, ballots. The ballots are stored in flash drives, on RAID arrays in servers, and on paper. They are delivered in the mail, through courier, by hand, by modem, by wi-fi, and by telephone. Try to engage in widespread, systematic fraud in that mess of systems--I dare you! Sure, some systems make it easy for localized fraud (harumph, Diebold in Ohio). But there's no way to defraud the entire process, or even a substantial (but perhaps not significant) portion of it. Long live our provincial ways!
For the record, I can see two attacks against this argument. First, going off of
my throwaway about Societal Infrastructure Software, it may be that as we move forward we will settle on digital-style voting exclusively, and such software is best handled on a nationwide scale. Second, hinted at parenthetically, is that voter fraud can be localized but still significant (see, for example, Florida in 2000).
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