After watching this video testemony you do not have to be a conspiracy theorist to think that the world’s largest democracy is riddled with corruption. In this video we see a former employee of Yang Enterprises (a government it contractor) state under oath that his firm was comissioned by a Republican congressman to build software capable of throwing a ballot and hiding the tampering.
He describes in some detail the technology and principles of how the software works. He states his reasons for believing that this software was actually used in the Ohio 2004 congressional elections. It all seems technically credible. Even if there was reason to doubt this individual’s testemony, the fact that everything he suggests is theoretically possible gives ample reason for concern.
Of course this is stating the utterly obvious: I think this illustrates clearly the need for an auditable paper trail in any form of eVoting system. Without a non-controversial means of auditing the ballot in a form that cannot easily be tampered with, it is quite clear that this sort of thing is going to keep happening. I think this is also the worst-case scenario of what happens when critical components of democracy are implemented as closed-source software. How on earth can we trust any electronic ballot when the results are so easy to falsify?
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