Security against Election Hacking (Freedom to Tinker)

Over at the Freedom to Tinker blog, Andrew Appel has a two-part series on security attacks and defenses for the upcoming elections in the US (though some of it will obviously be applicable elsewhere too). Part 1 looks at the voting and counting process with an eye toward ways to verify what the computers involved are reporting, but doing so without using the computers themselves (having and verifying the audit trail, essentially). Part 2 looks at the so-called cyberdefense teams and how their efforts are actually harming all of our security (voting and otherwise) by hoarding bugs rather than reporting them to get them fixed."With optical-scan voting, the voter fills in the bubbles next to the names of her selected candidates on paper ballot; then she feeds the op-scan ballot into the optical-scan computer. The computer counts the vote, and the paper ballot is kept in a sealed ballot box. The computer could be hacked, in which case (when the polls close) the voting-machine lies about how many votes were cast for each candidate. But we can recount the physical pieces of paper marked by the voter's own hands; that recount doesn't rely on any computer. Instead of doing a full recount of every precinct in the state, we can spot-check just a few ballot boxes to make sure they 100% agree with the op-scan computers' totals.Problem: What if it's not an optical-scan computer, what if it's a paperless touchscreen ("DRE, Direct-Recording Electronic) voting computer? Then whatever numbers the voting computer says, at the close of the polls, are completely under the control of the computer program in there. If the computer is hacked, then the hacker gets to decide what numbers are reported. There are no paper ballots to audit or recount. All DRE (paperless touchscreen) voting computers are susceptible to this kind of hacking. This is our biggest problem."