ctrl, alt, change votes

Your vote is probably safe, but not because the machines being used are secure.

Lately, reports of malfunctioning voting machines and registration fraud have been stoking fears of election rigging conspiracies. Many voters are nervous whether their votes will be counted or not and if the new electronic machines being rapidly adopted will make it easy for someone with enough power and access to sway an election and override millions of votes with the click of a button. Sadly, their fears are well justified since our voting machines are well… not exactly secure. Or all that accurate.

One of the most frequent scenarios proposed by the critics of computerized voting is a hacker working on behalf of a political party infecting voting machines with a virus to manipulate how the votes are counted. The virus is then uninstalled and with a lack of a paper trail, no one can prove who voted and how or even if there was any tampering.

Not even a paper trail could save the integrity of the vote count. You voted for Jack Johnson. Your printed receipt says you voted for John Jackson. You say that machine is malfunctioning so could it print the wrong name on the paper? Who to trust? In the imminent ass covering that will follow, no one will want to touch this mess.

Could hackers sway a national election? It's possible, but to make the kind of change necessary, one would need a team of thousands of hackers in swing states working in the right counties and adding just enough votes here and there to put a candidate just over the edge in electoral points as each voting machine counts votes on its own.

But there are a few problems with this theory. The first rule of any conspiracy is to keep it small. The less people are involved, the less communication has to take place and less of a chance that someone will talk. A covert staff of thousands of hackers is almost unmanageable and very risky as far as the villain in charge is concerned. A small group of hackers flying around the country would take too much time.

There are also limitations as to when and by how much one could rig an election. It has to be a very subtle nudge. If two candidates are separated by a wide margin and the hopelessly trailing candidate suddenly wins in a landslide thanks to a dozen counties, a lot of people are going to smell a giant sewer rat. The rigged election would have to be so close, its anybody's game and if over a few key states, a hundred thousand or so swing voters cast their ballots for the other guy.

Eh, they're swing voters, totally unpredictable and all. But of course theres also a chance that the very same swing voters you're trying to emulate will negate your rigging by the end of the voting day so your timing has to be impeccable. Rigging a national election is possible but its a very delicate balancing act that choreographs thousands of people across the country, a task risky enough to make would-be conspirators cringe.

Now if a national vote counting system was ever created, then a person with access to whatever back doors the system will need for maintenance and administration could change the result of and election in the privacy of his or her own home with a few clicks of a mouse, making election rigging much easier and far more tempting. And don't get me started on Internet ballots. The very idea should give voters nightmares.

But I would hope that our elected officials would never be dim enough to approve a system like this since it will come back to bite them and bite them hard. In the big picture, our votes are relatively safe. For now…