Benlog

crypto applied to public policy

Fixing Bugs and Breaking Certification

Filed under: crypto, voting — September 26, 2006 @ 1:56 pm

During the primaries, voting machines in Maryland broke down. As a result, the manufacturer, Diebold, has been hard at work on a fix. Today, they claim to have fixed the problem, though the Maryland Election Commissioner is cautiously waiting until further tests are conducted ext week before breathing a sigh of relief.

Clearly, this fix required an update to the voting machine software. And November elections are 6 weeks away. So, what happens to the certification process? Is there really time to re-certify between now and then? Is certification happening at all? How do we know that this software update didn’t introduce other bugs, maybe bugs in the way votes are recorded or counted?

1 Comment »

  1. joe:

    I started to write a comment… and then realized that I should write a post. My thoughts.

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