That’s the thing: The voting machines can be designed to be hack proof. It’s just a matter of spending money and people giving up “their rights” a bit.

What do I mean? It’s easy: First, the voting machines are designed and programmed, then simultaneously reviewed by an equal team of Democrat/Republican/Independent representative coders, who go through every line to assure no funny code, then clear it off. The systems are locked down and can not be upgraded.

Second, the voting stations equip wireless jammers. No wi-fi signals allowed.  All voting stations require voting machines to be plugged into UPCs (uninterruptable power centers) in case of power failure, which would be addressed by backup generators at each site.

Third, the process of performing the electronic vote: The voters submit their selections, and the data streams to a location-based server that records all votes as they happen- no access is available to this box, it is a dump drive.  Once data is written it cannot be changed, so someone trying to modify previous votes via hacking a digital voting booth would be unable to do so.

The data is also sent throughout the voting process through a hardline- not wireless- signal to a central authority that gathers all district votes. This signal would be highly encrypted- something that would take days to break- long past the election date. Only a group of election officials have access to these results, but are required to have multiple simultaneous entries- in other words, you can only see the results when there is a group of people who log in at the same time.

Last step? When the voting closes for a district, a multiple person team, with police escort, physically takes the on-site data drive to the election authority site. Upon arrival, the election authority examines the results of the voting through the hardline.  Then they plug the local site drive in and confirm the numbers match- there shouldn’t be a single digit off, as the data should be identical.

If there were discrepancies, the voting software would allow reports to be run to determine where the numerical difference arrived- if it occurred after reception through the hardline signal, those results would be discarded and the local site results would stand, to make certain no one pulled a miracle off and broke an insane encryption countless hours and days early.

Voila. Hack-proof electronic voting with no lost votes, no errors, no dangling chads, faster results, easy to understand screens with the ability to provide detailed information on candidates or proposals, and a system where no one can bypass it short of a massive conspiracy, such as buying everyone involved out- which is beyond unlikely to succeed.

I hope they didn’t learn about the last election

http://ElectNoMoreSpys.blogspot.com/

the update was from your original the WashEx link.

Nell, can you link me up?

Actually, wasn’t comparing hacks. Just considering the scope of hacks

Update: Obama campaign adviser Ben LaBolt sent an e-mail to The Washington Examiner Tuesday afternoon saying the events calendar is user-generated, so the security of the website has not been compromised. The campaign removed the event from its calendar following the Examiner’s report.