Nevada's now has e-voting machines with paper-trails. They're the first to manage this meager feat. The fuss that the e-voting companies have been kicking up about implementing auditable paper records sends chills down my spine -- it's hard to think of a reason for these companies to pretend it's impossible to get computers to print things on paper (unless, of course, they actually were planning on rigging an election). Well, Nevada has developed an actual counterexample to the e-voting companies' ridiculous claims. Good for them! It almost makes you feel guilty about filling their state with nuclear waste.

The electronic voting issue hasn't raised enough eyebrows this year. I think that's probably because people don't understand the grave threat that computer programmers like myself pose to democracy. But to do so, you really only have to know three things about programmers:

• They think they're much, much smarter than everyone else.


• They are much, much smarter than everyone else about technology, but are significantly dumber about most other things.


• And finally, a lot of them are asshole libertarians of the worst sort.

This is a combination that's primed to do clever things to save America from its hopelessly misguided self.

Even more horrifying, the folks at Diebold, one of the biggest vendors (and certainly the one that's gotten the most press thanks to its CEO's status as an outspoken Bush supporter) seems to have substandard engineers who exhibit all of the above negative traits, yet built their system on top of an unsecured version of Windows 98, opening the door to election tampering from an even larger pool of evil nerds.

I have absolutely no doubt that many software engineers would tamper with election software if they had the opportunity. I don't think they'd do this without getting caught, but it's likely that an awful lot of votes would be lost in the process. It looks like Nevada's leading the charge on stopping this, and I for one am grateful. Enough so that I think I'll go lose some money in its casinos at the next available opportunity.

UPDATE: I mistakenly indicated above that Diebold's voting system runs on an unsecured copy of Win 98. Actually, it can run on any variant of Win32 (ie 98 and above). That copy can be secured as well as any vanilla install of the given version of Windows. What's not secured at all is the MS Access database that contains the voting records, or the administrator password of the GEMS system. This url contains a thorough explanation of how to circumvent the system -- it's an obvious exploit that's easy to pull off (in fact, it's tough to call it an exploit -- "using MS Access" is more like it). The authors conclude that these vulnerabilities are so gaping and widespread that they must have been left deliberately. I don't know if I'd go that far (although I could be talked into it), but whatever state election officials paid money for this system -- and yes, it is being used "in the wild" -- ought to be fired. And maybe jailed.

I should note that this vulnerability applies to "GEMS" -- the management software that would be used collect and count votes from individual machines in an election official's office. There are some accounts that claim the voting machines have a backdoor as well, but I have yet to find any thorough documentation on this.