1.) There are multiple flaws and glitches with the Diebold voting machines that make people skeptical about them. For one, the documentary proved that the tallying program, Gems, can be hacked in less than a minute, even if you don't know the administrative password. They simply went in the code of a mock high school president election and changed the outcome. With an administrative password, Howard Dean logged into Gems and changed everything without having to deal with codes at all. Likewise, they also showed that Diebold votes can be hacked on just the memory card, without going into Gems at all. On the memory card they wrote a program that reverses the number of votes per candidate, but keeping the total number of voters the same. That way, it doesn't look suspicious because the number of total votes is proportional. Also, the reciepts that get printed and signed by a precinct official are wrong. Unlike a Gems hack, where the original local votes are accounted and signed for but the flaws come with the total votes at the end, the memory card hack is undetectable. This is incredibly frightening considering the elections in the past decade have been incredibly close and that having a different president may have changed the course of history completely. Also, the documentary showed that votes from local precincts are not compared with the county results. After digging in garbage to find the original signed voter receipts, they did not match the 'copies' that were printed at the voting center. Aside from hacks, Diebold has been accused of promising votes to winning candidates for money, they throw away original voting receipts that are protected under law, they inadequately test machines, and when they are presented with one of the multiple flaws in their system, they simply lie about it. I think that flaws like this are one of the reasons that the voting outcome has been so low lately.
2.) If I was in charge of monitoring elections in California, I would make many revisions to the system to make sure the elections are fair, especially if I was an elected official. The Rolling Stone article noted that it is not required that voting machines print out a paper trail anymore, which is frightening because that was one of the few comparison pieces. I would enforce paper receipts at all precincts AND a monitor to make sure that the totals from the signed documents match the totals from Gems. In fact, I would have multiple monitors and they would be handpicked random officials whose identity would be more secret than the MPAA Rating Board. However, that covers a Gems hack, but not the just as easy to complete memory card hack. I'm not sure if there could be a fool proof plan to protect the memory cards at the local electorate level but I would attempt to make their movement more secure. If Diebold can have ATM machines that very few can hack, and if they can find adequate means to transfer all that money around, I'm sure they can also find a way to make voting memory cards secure. Maybe kept in a lockbox that only a nonpartisan third party can access, preferably not also a Diebold employee. At the state level I would also make sure that all memory cards are accounted for and don't "accidentally" get lost somewhere. However, I would pressure Diebold to make the memory cards more secure. Because that would be out of my jurisdiction, I would attempt to enforce Diebold to encrypt their memory cards better, I know it is possible. Government agencies, school records, banks, even online games use strong encryption that makes it difficult to hack at all, let alone in a few minutes. Votes are more precious and should be secure, Diebold simply has to try, retest, and wait until they have a product that is far more reliable than what they're currently testing.
