Any competent computer engineer can extract or plant programming that is alien to the machine's intention
Coding is a frustrating, trying occupation. I congratulate them for their work. But many of them live on the edge. The slightest error can break things. The misplaced dot or bracket can cause the entire project to tumble and fall with no help from the computer. The idea that an entire nation’s future or fate is reliant on a programmer or group of programmers is frightening, to say the least. That is not a slight on programmers, but voting should be almost a religious experience. It’s the act of exercising the most basic of freedoms. It should be about a relationship between the voter and a piece of paper. Not a computer.
Dominion machines have been in the news these past few years. President Trump says their machines have lost him millions of votes and insists that the deletion of votes and the inappropriate influence over the company by his political opponents have been problematic. Whether it is true or not, it is immaterial. Why? Because any voting machine can be hacked!
Trump certainly has a point. Any competent computer engineer can extract or plant programming that is alien to the machine's intention.
Some of the best hackers gathered together recently in Las Vegas to try to break into voting machines. And these machines will be used in this coming election. The result? They found weaknesses, and it is too late to fix them.
This wasn’t positive news for a citizenry that has developed a healthy mistrust of the whole system. This is not the first test of voting machines; there have been many, and what is worse, manufacturers, in many cases, ignore these findings.
Every year for the last ten years, weaknesses have been found in these systems, and in the latest case, “multiple pages” worth. Even more frustrating is that the hackers find, in many cases, the same amount of vulnerabilities year after year.