after the switch got made to electronic voting machines some say the safest way to vote in elections so as to avoid tampering these days is ... paper

In the last fifteen years I've come across any number of advocates for making everything in culture as computer-administrated as possible.  I'm not a huge fan of the cloud but some swear by it.  I use email and have used it a lot in my life but it's old school compared to twitter or other systems. 

But some things it seems good to be a stickler about.  There are things for which nothing electronic can be an entirely adequate substitute.  Money in hand, for instance, is money in hand, not data points on a file number. 

Don't expect to find anything blogged here about the history of MH to be on anything like a cloud, for instance. 

Well, in light of election hacking concerns the simple ballot may be one of those things where if our society had not embraced tech-voting it would have been harder to hack the election cycle if the election cycle got hacked.  Not sure it's as simple as that but in a way if our collective fetish for doing everything electronically that could have been done with pencil and paper is as bad as I sometimes feel it is then in some sense maybe we deserved to have our idolatry of electronic communication and security chastened a bit.  Which is still not to say I wanted the guy in office who's in office now, it just seems too soon to scapegoat Russians as if the Cold War was still on.

Now for the excerpts from the article.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/guardian-of-the-vote/544155/

 

 

For years, Barbara Simons was the loneliest of Cassandras—a technologist who feared what technology had wrought. Her cause was voting: Specifically, she believed that the electronic systems that had gained favor in the United States after the 2000 presidential election were shoddy, and eminently hackable. She spent years publishing opinion pieces in obscure journals with titles like Municipal World and sending hectoring letters to state officials, always written with the same clipped intensity.

 

Simons, who is now 76, had been a pioneer in computer science at IBM Research at a time when few women not in the secretarial pool walked its halls. In her retirement, however, she was coming off as a crank. Fellow computer scientists might have heard her out, but to the public officials she needed to win over, the idea that software could be manipulated to rig elections remained a fringe preoccupation. Simons was not dissuaded. “They didn’t know what they were talking about and I did,” she told me.

 

She wrote more articles, wrote a book, badgered policy makers, made “a pain of myself.” Though a liberal who had first examined voting systems under the Clinton administration, she did battle with the League of Women Voters (of which she is a member), the ACLU, and other progressive organizations that had endorsed paperless voting, largely on the grounds that electronic systems offered greater access to voters with disabilities.

 

Simons was called a Luddite. At times, she was treated as just short of raving. At a League of Women Voters convention, she took a turn at the microphone to challenge the league’s president. The moderator tried to yank the mic from her hand.

 

Simons is not grappling for mics anymore. In late July, at the annual Def Con hacker conference, in Las Vegas, she addressed an event called the Voting Village—a staged attack on voting machines. “I lose sleep over this. I hope you will too,” she told the hackers who had packed into a windowless conference room at Caesars Palace.

 

Four voting machines had been secured for the event, three of them types still in use. One team of hackers used radio signals to eavesdrop on a machine as it recorded votes. Another found a master password online. Within hours of getting their hands on the machines, the hackers had discovered vulnerabilities in all four.

 

...

 

Evidence has yet to emerge that Russia successfully manipulated voting systems in 2016, and most of Russia’s probing appears to have been aimed at databases of registered voters, not the machines that record votes. But Simons believes that the failure to heed her warnings has left states in grave danger, with too many potential weak points to shore up before hackers do succeed in altering an outcome. It is not a theoretical vulnerability, Simons told me. “Our democracy is in peril. We are wide open to attack.”

 

“It’s not that I don’t like computing or I don’t like computers. I mean, I am a computer scientist,” she said. “Many of the leading opponents of paperless voting machines were, and still are, computer scientists, because we understand the vulnerability of voting equipment in a way most election officials don’t. The problem with cybersecurity is that you have to protect against everything, but your opponent only has to find one vulnerability.”