Folly Of Electronic Voting Software

Dear Editor,

Using electronic voting software as the primary and sole method to record, tabulate, and report votes is folly because it’s inherently insecure, incapable of being secured, and claims of it providing reliable election results are foolish. All electronic voting machines, aka devices, require software. It is software that controls the devices, and together, they make many of our current voting systems. We value accurate results with extreme reliability. Electronic Voting Software cannot deliver the value we expect, and we are being foolish to rely on voting systems entirely based on electronic voting software.

Most if not all electronic voting software is proprietary meaning few people know the code and all of its capabilities. Konnech, the PollChief election software provider, is one of the latest examples of the foolishness of relying on software. One person Eugene Yu, the deposed Konnech CEO, was able to hide his deceit from all PollCheif users and his ostensibly computer-savvy co-workers. It was happenchance that Los Angeles County uncovered Yu’s deceit as they were investigating some other issue when they noticed their data on Chinese servers. Now L.A. County wants their money back for breach of contract. Marion, Lake, and Allen counties are known to use PollChief software and have spent lots of money on it. In 2017, Marion County inked a contract totaling $1.18 million. Yet, all that money has not rendered a voting system of great value.

Oh sure, county officials are quick to say that the PollChief software is not used for vote capture and subsequent result calculation, but that is irrelevant. The point is all software is vulnerable.

Unrelated to election software, but more to the point of software vulnerabilities, are the hacks of the Indiana Housing Authority and UKG (KRONOS). If UKG cannot keep my timecard and personal identifying information secure and my state government cannot keep its systems secure, why should I place any value on a voting system that relies on software?

My vote is valuable, and I demand a document reflective of that value. No vote-counting system is foolproof, but documentation is a reliable source for input to a system. We need a ballot that is capable of use with multiple methods of tabulation, which can be used for timely audits and validation of the primary method of tabulation.

Some flimsy ballot with perforated chads for poking or circles for filling will not suffice, nor does a voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) meet this need. VVPAT is a red herring to draw attention away from the fact that electronic voting software is recording your vote. It is the software that prints the VVPAT. The possibility for the software to print accurately, yet tabulate inaccurately exists. How timely would a VVPAT audit be? By what method would such a VVPAT audit be conducted? The genius behind VVPAT has not offered answers to these questions.

Sadly, our elected officials are spending our money on suspect voting systems that yield results of questionable value. Our elections are the foundation on which our government is built. The Founding Fathers rendered us a representative republic, and it is up to us to keep it. They understood the pitfalls of democracy. They limited our practice of democracy to Election Day, and we extended the practice to Primary Day. We must have election systems capable of forming the foundation needed to uphold our representative republic. Until we invest in voting systems capable of creating the needed foundation, we will continue to form discord rather than a more perfect union.

David W Waters

Indianapolis