Steven Holt: “This past Tuesday, a day ago, I voted in the school board elections in my home district. For the first time our county…”

“This past Tuesday, a day ago, I voted in the school board elections in my home district. For the first time our county, Mercer County, New Jersey, used electronic touch screen machines, the so-called DRE, one brand of the DRE machines. As I expected, they were clear, easy to use, accessible. I think they would be good for people with physical disabilities, better probably than the old lever machines. And they were, as I expected, totally unverifiable. Now, why do I say that? Because the manufacturers will say, oh, we have batteries in there so if the power fails, they will not crash. Of course, there are a lot of computer engineers who promise that their software will not crash. But the manufacturers say, well, we store the votes in two different memory locations so there is redundancy. With the electronic machines there is no way after the polls close that you can go back and determine what was the intention of each voter because there is this fundamental principle of secrecy.”