I recently attended Pycon 2007 in Dallas, TX. It's for those interested in the Python programming language and all the amazingly cool things you can do with the language. One of the session formats is called a lightning talk: wherein a whole bunch of people are only given five minutes to make a presentation, slideshow and all. This way the audience doesn't get bored. One of the more impressive demonstrations was by a graduate student at UC Berkeley showing how people can electronically vote easily and securely.
A Diebold voting machine has over 31,000 lines of code. His program had less than 300. Which do think is easier to audit?
In his amazingly short demo, Ka-Ping Yee pointed out that a Diebold machine had 31,000 plus lines of C++ code and that his had less than 300 lines of Python code. It's irrelevant what language the code is in, though some languages make it easier than others. It is far easier to do a security audit on 300 lines of code than 30,000. A programmer could walk a non programmer through those 300 lines in an afternoon without making their eyes glaze over. A team of programmers would probably take weeks to examine the other.
I would recommend watching his slide show and it will walk you through the steps, and you'll see how it is possible to make electronic voting far more secure than it is now. With the proper checks and balances people can be sure their vote is counted. These checks are sadly lacking in Diebold's and others voting machine technology.
He didn't mention anything about a paper audit, but it would be trivial to add a few lines of code to print out the cast ballot. Not only does this make it possible to vote more securely (by an order of magnitude), his demo makes it easier for the voter to cast a vote (including those requiring accessibility).
The demonstration showed in stark contrast how it is possible to make electronic voting far more trustworthy through open source and that Diebold and their ilk are a bunch of secretive, untrustworthy jerks. They threaten the very foundations of our democratic system with their proprietary systems. And of course we've seen numerous excellent diaries here about Diebold here on DailyKos.
Link: http://zesty.ca/...
Slideshow: http://zesty.ca/...
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On another note, I also saw a demo at Pycon of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) up close and personal. I was a little skeptical of it at first, but the engineering is amazing and much thought went in to making it work in third world environments off the grid. I might write a diary about it later, but for now go to laptop.org and read up on it.