Hacking Voting Machines at Defcon
I used to think electronic voting was the logical next step. But now, I think voting is too important to be left to electronics. It should be done on paper.<p><i>We trust billions of dollars every day to electronic banking, so why not a vote?</i> Electronic banking comes with many types of federal guarantees to protect against fraud. The government can step in to investigate and prosecute the fraud as well. But there is no such guarantee for the voting to select the government itself!<p><i>But it takes so long to aggregate the votes if done with paper ballots.</i> Precisely the point. Electronic voting allows <i>scalable attacks</i> where the number of weak points is dramatically reduced. It is very hard to scale attacks on paper ballots. You would need a coordinated effort in many voting stations to make it work as opposed to hacking a more central electronic system.<p>That is why I moved from thinking that electronic voting is the logical next step to thinking that we probably need to revert back to paper ballots.