Yesterday, slashdot linked to another article questioning the security of the Diebold voting machines. Checking the forums (here, not at slashdot), I found the debate over the article quickly switching gears to a debate over Bev Harris. The biggest posts, the longest threads, all of them debating someone who by all accounts had little or nothing to do with this particular article.
This seems a pretty good demonstration of exactly what's going on when I read the papers, watch the news, read a news website / blog, or what-have-you; all the meat of the story is focused on the people debating, and not the debate itself. When all is said and done, does anyone really learn anything from this? Or, to loosely quote America: the Book, 'did Bush convince the people? Who cares, how about asking if what he said is true or not?'
We're all guilty of it, to one degree or another, we trust the words of an 'authority', and examine their credentials rather than the merits and flaws of their argument. To a point this makes sense, as a few casual words on physics from Richard Feynman likely mean more than a thesis from most anyone else. However, there comes a point where you have to stop and examine a person's words, and see if they stand on their own; and if they don't, ask exactly how much the argument trades on the name or charisma of the speaker.
The same holds true in reverse; just because a speaker lacks credibility doesn't necessarily mean his argument does. For all I may mistrust the current president, and find his claims dubious at best, if he really did churn out a bang-up economy and / or find WMDs in the Iraq, then I'd have to concede there
might be some merit to what he's saying.
Thus, I submit impeaching the speaker doesn't necessarily impeach the argument; in fact, the two are often entirely separate things.
So... let's put aside the static over who's saying what and instead look directly at what they're saying; that the voting machines Diebold is selling us are not secure, or at the very least, not secure enough.
From what I've read, at Black Box Voting, Open Voting, a Finnish site that dissected the software, and in at least one auditor report, neither the hardware or software of the Diebold machines seems designed with security or auditing as a priority - or what I would say, enough of a priority. Simply put, if the accounts I've read are both accurate and repeatable (as they appear to be), then the system can be tampered with, in a manner that could both preclude detection and easy repair, replicate itself at time of connection / voting tally, and provide an easy means to tamper with future elections.
Whether or not there is a conspiracy is beside the point - if an individual, or group of individuals can tamper with one or more machines and leave no evidence of said tampering, then this is not an acceptable level of security for an election system. Quite the contrary, any electronic system for tallying votes should be so ironclad secure no one this side of a Gibson novel can possibly tamper with it.
I would like to think this is one argument we can all agree on, no matter who's making it or for what purpose.
Next, there's the auditing, the 'paper trail'. We've seen multiple instances of entire voting tallies discarded because a district used a machine that later threw an error or lost the data, and thus lost the votes. Again, this is unacceptable for a voting machine. Forget whether or not it's happened before, in a modern election using modern equipment, not having a backup is reckless. If we turned off the backup tapes at work, as soon as anything went wrong, there's be an entire IT department looking for work. Does anyone care to offer the argument my work is more important than an election? I thought not.
I don't mean for this to be a 'bash diebold' moment; in fact, I'm less aggravated with them than I am with the people who signed the checks. It's every companies right to make a product as strong or weak as they feel is necessary (within reason), just as it's our right not to by it. By all accounts, my home wireless network is at least as secure as those machines, and my personal data better archived. Anyone considering them for purchase should've noticed this and declined purchase.