Do the voters or the voting administration have any way to determine which software runs on the machine? Nope.
As the people who have the key, the voting administration would in fact be the only people who'd decide this. Obviously such a system is useless if you give the key to people you don't trust, I can't believe I needed to write that explicitly.
Posted May 21, 2009 19:24 UTC (Thu) by anton (guest, #25547)
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As the people who have the key, the voting administration
would in fact be the only people who'd decide this. Obviously such a
system is useless if you give the key to people you don't
trust
So you have replaced a system where any person can check that the
votes are cast and counted correctly with one where we have to place
blind trust in the voting administration. And if that was not bad
enough, it's not the local administration that I had in mind, but some
central agency (which makes any manipulation much more effective), and
judging from the past, they will just delegate that power to the
voting machine vendors.
Note that checking the casting and counting by any person was even
possible in East Germany, as I recently heard in a 20-years-after
documentation; a few people did that in a few precincts and got a
result that had more votes against the ruling party than the official
result for the whole country. This embarrassment for the ruling party
and the election would not have happened with voting machines
(locked-down or not).