Democracy's Weakest Link

As many people suspected, Princeton has shown that it's really easy to hack a Diebold voting machine. Like many corporations, Diebold prefers to deal with technical problems (faulty design) with non-technical tools. One tool is ignoring the problem. Another tool is attacking critics. A third tool is keeping the design secret so that nobody knows how bad the system is. An example of the first two tools follows.

"[Our critics are] throwing out a 'what if' that's premised on a basis of an evil, nefarious person breaking the law," Bear told Newsweek after the March Emery County study. "For there to be a problem here," he further explained to the New York Times, "you're basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of software … I don't believe these evil elections people exist." -- Hack the Vote? No Problem on Salon.com

A fundamental technique of secure system design involves playing a malicious party. At point of entry in the system, this party gets to say "What if this happens here?" I'll bet companies that make slot machines don't answer that question "Surely there's nobody so evil to do that!" That's right. Your gambling rights are better protected and enforced than your voting rights.