Man and Machine
The Biography Channel had a program tonight called Breaking Las Vegas, about a slot machine company that jimmied the code in its poker machine chips. In 93 locations, when a player hit a royal flush, the program had been altered to change the last card 50% of the time, so the player saw a near miss instead of a jackpot.
Through that and other fudges, the investigators figured out that the crooked machines had withheld between twelve and fifteen million dollars in payoffs.
Now then, about electronic voting …
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So who tipped off the authorities? How did they know to look into it, and who were the investigators?
Even within companies that claim technology as a core strength, familiarity with the actual code and algorithms is rare … one or two steps up the corporate ladder are administrators, not alpha-dog programmers. This will be as true for electronic voting. You need other ways to check, like a control set of machines certified to be running the same software. With that sort of setup, you could create known voting blocks to submit to the machines, and then check their accounting on the other end.
Comment by Mycroft — April 11, 2007 @ 7:19 am