HistoryNewsNetwork: Why You Should Be Scared to Death of Electronic Voting

"Imagine what opportunities nineteenth-century politicos like Matt Quay would see in the recent trend toward paying private companies to count the votes in our elections. It might take the old Pennsylvania Republican boss a while to understand innovations like electronic voting and computerized voter lists. But he’d soon see how the new trends could give him high-tech versions of the low-tech practices he knew so well.
As the GOP’s national chairman during the 1888 presidential election, Quay managed to eke out a narrow victory -- in the electoral vote, anyway -- for Benjamin Harrison. He later said Harrison “would never learn how close a number of men were compelled to approach the gates of the penitentiary to make him president.”
If no one ended up behind bars, it was no thanks to Quay’s colleague, GOP national treasurer William Dudley. He wrote to party operatives in Indiana, assuring them he had secured “the aid necessary” to give Harrison a 10,000 vote plurality in that swing state. Dudley told them to organize the “floaters” they bribed into blocks of five under the charge of “a trusted man with the necessary funds.”
The letter fell into the hands of Democrats, who released it to the press. The ensuing scandal embarrassed the GOP, but it wasn’t enough to blunt Harrison’s thin edge over incumbent Grover Cleveland.
Whether Dudley was careless or merely unlucky, his problem was that it was not easy to bribe, intimidate, and impersonate -- the most common ways of stealing elections at the time -- while keeping these actions hidden. In the retail politics of the nineteenth century, elections were labor-intensive affairs in which even illegal votes had to be bought or stolen one person at a time. The more voters you bribed, the greater your risk.
Nineteenth-century machine pols would immediately see the beauty of a system that let them steal elections without bribing a single voter. That’s what can be done with the insecure, poorly tested vote-counting software touted by today’s electronic voting companies. No more keeping a tight rein on unreliable “floater” voters. No more paying riffraff to impersonate storekeepers and church deacons. Instead of bribing people to vote a particular way, let them vote anyway they like. Their votes can be changed later if the need arises. No one will know.
Computer scientists and security experts say the systems are so insecure they can be manipulated from inside -- by government poll workers and employees of the contractors -- and hacked from the outside. No one will know because those experts also say such vote-tampering would be nearly impossible to detect. E-voting systems also aren’t open to public scrutiny. The code is proprietary, written and owned by the vendors hired to record and count the votes."