Searching Thru Software for Easter Eggs
Happy Easter. Let’s talk about Easter eggs.
Not the holiday Easter eggs, but the computer software easter eggs–hidden bits of programming that open up only when certain secret commands are given. They are a threat to voting machines.
That’s one reason machines are supposedly “tested and tested and tested” –to see if the code works correctly and to hunt for easter eggs. Testing might find hidden code, but it can’t guarantee no hidden code went undetected.
So we have asked for open source software, or at least for the current software to be made public. Even if the code is open today, a future change of code could introduce new problems. Most election officials and poll watchers can’t tell the status of the code anyway.
There’s a better solution to this threat: audits
We can’t decipher code but we could easily audit the paper ballots. A good audit could make us 99% certain that the election was correctly called.
We just need to let statisticians show us how many ballots to hand count in each case. The number varies with the number of precincts, their sizes, and the margin of victory.
Relying on software to determine elections has been condemned by the Technical Guidelines Development Committee of the National Institute for Standards and Technology. It’s time to turn to audits.