-- A securities transaction leaves an audit trail. IIRC, if you place an buy/sell order over the phone, the broker is supposed to record the call. Place a trade through an on-line broker, you get a trade or confirmation number, and a page you can print out. Similar things exist for large electronic trades between institutional investors, and there are organizations that oversee trade settlement: DTC here in the US, Euroclear in the Euro zone... I was involved in this side of the business for two years; Jordan likely knows much more about it. But anyway, in case of a dispute, there's a record or 3rd party you have recourse to. One of the biggest weaknesses of the computerized and touch screen voting systems is that they don't have audit trails. You cast your vote and it goes...well, wherever. Candidate B trouces Candidate A, and if Candidate A wants to challenge or ask for a recount, there's nothing to refer to. The pathetic thing is that it would be relatively simple to add a small printer to these systems that would print out a paper ballot that the voter would approve and then dump into a bin, thus keeping a physical and auditable record.
Bottom line: a system that cannot be audited cannot be trusted.
--The CEO of Diebold, a leading manufacturer of voting systems, is a prominent Ohio Republican who penned an invitation to a big ticket fundraising get-together that promised to "deliver Ohio for George W. Bush in 2004." Howard Ahmanson, one of the owners of Election Systems and Software, another voting systems vendor (but perhaps not strictly speaking a competitor, since principles in Diebold also hold large blocs of shares in it) has ties to the Chalcedon Institute, a think-tank for a frankly theocratic Xtian movement known as Xtian Reconstruction. So you've got the heads of two of the major vendors of these systems with open ideological commitments to the right, and they don't care about the apparence of conflict of interest. Scary.
Curtiss
>> Frank Scott wrote:
>>
>> I have difficulty understanding why or how it
>> would be so difficult to assure accuracy in vote
>> casting and counting, when it is pretty efficient
>> to trade, swap, buy, sell and probably extort
>> billions of dollars every hour, utilizing the same
>> basic electronics...can someone explain?
>
> Dwayne Monroe wrote:
> Efficient? Maybe yes. Sufficiently secure for voting? Definitely no.
>
>The problem can be divided into two main categories of potential
attack:
>
> 1.) Interception of data streams, transmitted via the
> public Internet, which could be decrypted and
> modified.
>
> 2.) Intrusion into Internet linked servers storing
> voting data.
>
> Many Internet voting systems vendors rely upon
> Microsoft software for hosting and processing data.
> Such systems have been proven to be spectacularly
> hackable (think now, of the recent "Blaster" worm,
> which exploited a design element of Windows networking
> and propagated robustly across the world).