Mark Kleiman informs me about something alarming. Bad enough for me to tell the pregnant chads to come home all is forgiven. The new(er) electronic vote counting machines can be hacked. Actually it is trivial to do so (double click and edit the *.dbd file).

This is interesting partly because the manufacturer is trying to use its copywrite to block diffusion of internal e-mails describing the problem. It is mainly interesting because it is a threat to US democracy.

Now I don't really know much about computers, but it is obvious how this problem could be solved. As the e-mail (reproduced by Kleiman) notes the problem is that hard disks are read/write devices. Now the laptop on which I am typing also has a write only device -- a CD burner with a RW CD in it.

If our currently elected officials and/or the manufacturer of the vote counting system cared, they could add a CD burner to the vote counting machine and have the machine write votes to the CD. Now I don't mean an off the shelf CD but rather ones with signatures serial numbers you know like money (or paper ballots) placed in a sealed CD burner only to be opened in the presence of representatives of rival parties etc.

It seems to me that a fancy software based approach to guaranteing the authenticity of voting records is bound to be vulnerable to smart hackers, but that a simple hardware based approach to a paperless paper trail already exists. If fact, it has existed for a long time since sealed write once read many times (WORM) drives have been around much longer than CD burners (about 15 years old now).

I suppose there is an explanation other than bad faith for reliance on hard disks but I sure can't think of it.