“America Won’t Give Up Its Hackable Wireless Voting Machines”

This Bloomberg piece on Web-connected election machines scapegoats the public craving for instant results. 

“The pressure to promptly transmit results to news organizations –- and ultimately voters — is so great that election officials have no choice but to briefly connect voting systems to the internet at the end of the night, said Paul Lux, the elections supervisor of Okaloosa County, Florida and a member of the EAC advisory committee that develops technical guidelines.”

“If everyone would just be patient on election night and let us produce the results, then there’s no real debate here about wireless transmission,” Lux said.

I’ve thought for a while now that we’d all actually be a lot better served, substantively, by some election-day self-restraint with the preliminary results and the pre-preliminary reults and the pre-pre-preliminary results.  And that’s as unrealistic as the hope that the media reporting on the security vulnerabilities caused by the promise of the instant results they offer might lead that charge.

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