A Scientist's Quest for an Accessible, Unhackable Voting Machine
Freeman writes:
After 19 years of work, Juan Gilbert says he has invented the most secure voting machine
In late 2020, a large box arrived at Juan Gilbert's office at the University of Florida. The computer science professor had been looking for this kind of product for months. Previous orders had yielded poor results. This time, though, he was optimistic.
Gilbert drove the package home. Inside was a transparent box, built by a French company and equipped with a 27-inch touchscreen. Almost immediately, Gilbert began modifying it. He put a printer inside and connected the device to Prime III, the voting system he has been building since the first term of the George W. Bush administration.
After 19 years of building, tinkering, and testing, he told Undark this spring, he had finally invented "the most secure voting technology ever created."
[...] By this point, Gilbert had published a video of his ballot-marking device, or BMD, in action, but he was unsure how the hacking community would respond. "There's a part of that community that's very confident in what they do," he said. "And if they hear how it works, they may run away from it."
[...] The latest version of the machine, which Gilbert and his students finalized this year, has all the parts of a normal voting machine: a touch screen for voters to make their selections and a printer to create a paper ballot that is then fed into a scanner.
The machine also has some more distinctive security features. The touchscreen is transparent, allowing voters to watch the machine print their ballot, in real-time, and notice any issues. The whole machine is also encased in fully transparent glass, making it difficult to insert, say, a malicious USB drive undetected. And the machine's operating system, software, printer connection, and ballot information are stored on a read-only Blu-ray Disc. Unlike a typical hard drive, which voting technology skeptics say could be manipulated to change a person's votes, the disc cannot be overwritten, modified, or changed in any way. "I have taken away that ability," said Gilbert. "You cannot change it."
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