DJT thanks Musk for 'vote-counting computers'

[Celerity]

18. How US Voting Machines Became Safer Than Ever

Clear Ballot shows just how slow, steady and paper-dependent the industry is.

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-us-voting-machines-clear-ballot/

https://archive.ph/o8JFk



Chip Trowbridge is confident his voting machines are secure, but he’ll run the thought experiment with you. An assortment of the machines are resting on a counter at the downtown Boston office of Clear Ballot Group Inc., and Trowbridge, the company’s chief technology officer, is facetiously pointing out the bonkers number of steps a bad actor would need to take to compromise one of its ClearCast computer scanners.

Any tampering would have to take place on-site, because the ClearCast systems aren’t connected to the internet. Most arrive at county voting precincts in fastened containers or locked cages. “There’s one 120-volt plug out the back, and that’s it—no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, no Ethernet, no nothing,” Trowbridge says. Republican and Democratic officials are supposed to set them up together by tearing security seals with identifying serial numbers and entering unique passwords after booting them up. Data is stored on three redundant drives, including two locked-in USB sticks, and any poll worker inputs on the devices (such as removing one of the sticks) are logged by the equivalent of an airplane’s black box.

Then there’s the paper trail. On Election Day, voters feed their handmarked ballots into the scanner, which is the size of a cash register and has a thick screen on top. It tabulates blackened ovals and captures a digital image of the entire slip for backup, then spits the ballot down into a bolted cabinet so it can be audited by hand if needed. The scanners are tested with sample votes beforehand, and often afterward, to ensure there are no discrepancies between digital counts and physical entries. As Trowbridge entertains and ultimately shoots down increasingly absurd but-what-about-this scenarios, such as counterfeit ballots or malware-laced thumb drives, he stops short with a frank reminder: “We’re already in crazy territory if any of this is happening.”



Clear Ballot and its larger rivals, Dominion Voting Systems Corp. and Election Systems & Software LLC, operate in a different kind of crazy territory these days. The industry has long experienced perpetual upheaval. Following the paper-ballot fiasco of 2000 (hanging chads, anyone?), sweeping regulations pushed the US from punch cards to paperless DREs, or direct-recording electronics. Voters hit buttons or a touchscreen, and their selections were programmed into the computer’s memory. But DREs fell out of favor in the 2010s, because the virtual approach didn’t allow for manual recounts, and they were hard to check for inaccuracies and meddling. So began a shift back to physical ballots, particularly after Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump and Democrats howled about Russian interference and questioned the 2016 election’s legitimacy.

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