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The voting machines are kept in secure warehouses and transported on election day to the polls. The cartridges containing the ballot info are programmed by the warehouse staff just prior to being taken to the polling places. A simulated upload is performed to insure that what is entered is in fact what is uploaded. There are checks and balances in place at every step of the way.

One improvement that would make it even more failsafe is to print out a randomized vote total prior to the cartridge being removed. This will probably be SOP within a few years. The challenge here is to preserve the anonymity of individual voters to insure a secret ballot.



Peter Dow (ML) wrote:
I assume you're talking about during an election. What about the rest of the time, say 6 months before the election? Is there anything to verify the software in the voting machine when they haul it out of storage for an election?

Wayne McAlpine wrote:

That's correct. But the machines are never out from under the watchful eyes of the poll commissioners at each precinct, so that would be a very difficult thing to do. The cartridges are kept physically secure during the entire process.

Booth Martin wrote:
In other words, to manipulate the totals a villain would need to change the results as, or after, the votes are cast but before the vote totals are removed from the voting machine?

Wayne McAlpine wrote:

One of the first principles of managing an elections system, manual or automated, is that there is never just one copy of the vote totals. Multiple copies of the vote totals from each machine are maintained by different governmental entities at different locations. Totals are certified by a Board of Elections Commissioners at the local level before they become final in the Secretary of State's computer system. It would require collusion on a massive scale to alter the totals.







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