Small Vote Manipulations Can Swing Elections

[flyingfysh]

This is the title of a short scholarly paper in the "Communications of the ACM", the main publication of the Association for Computing Machinery, an old and well-respected computer professional organization. I don't have access to any online copies, unfortunately. The subtitle is "Considering the effects and implications of changing only a single vote per machine".

Below are some excerpts from the paper. If you know any ACM members or can get to a library which carries the journal, you should look at the whole article.

"E-voting machines potentially make electoral fraud unprecedentedly simple. An election saboteur need only introduce a small change in the master copy of the voting software to be effective."

"Such slight manipulations, despite significantly changing the outcome of the election, are small enough that they might plausibly evade detection entirely, be dismissed as random noise if detected, be obscured by noise inherent in the voting and auditing process, or fail to prompt a recount if they are detected but their significance is underestimated of misunderstood."

"This emphasizes the importance of a voter-verified audit trail as protection against this sort of pervasive, subtle manipulation. To guard against such an attack, the correspondence between each voter's intentions and the tally reported by the system must be made absolute by such means as the Mercuri method, where each voter personally verifies a machine-produced paper ballot that is then counted by machine in a reliable, repeatable manner, but can nonetheless still be counted manually."

[Bandit]

1. Kick....I just hope if/when this is done it is our side doing it.

Wake Up America. Why would you possibly not want a paper trail?