Why do we need electronic voting machines, really?<\/p>\n
When we started Open Market in 1994 and built one of the first eCommerce systems, we realized we might be opening pandora’s box for fraud.\u00a0 At that time, you could steal all of the off-line credit card numbers you wanted, with surreptitious<\/span> swipes, receipts (before XXX7307 was printed), etc.<\/p>\n The problem is the Internet enables anonymous, scalable, and transferable fraud.\u00a0 Attacks are effectively anonymous because they’re impossible to trace.\u00a0 Automation makes stealing 10,000 cards as easy as 1.\u00a0 And transferability lets one attacker develop an attack, and give it to 1,000 others (often with less skill, like script kiddies<\/a>).\u00a0 (Compare this to lock-picking:\u00a0 difficult to do without being physically present, difficult to pick extra locks, and hard to teach someone else to do.)<\/p>\n Pure electronic voting introduces these same problems, without the corresponding benefits.\u00a0 Elections are infrequently occurring events, with high stakes and incentives to tamper.<\/p>\n What’s wrong with optically scanned paper ballots?\u00a0 Machines can help with counting, but there’s always<\/strong> a way to verify.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Why do we need electronic voting machines, really? When we started Open Market in 1994 and built one of the first eCommerce systems, we realized we might be opening pandora’s box for fraud.\u00a0 At that time, you could steal all … Continue reading