Why are electronic election machines different from safety-critical systems with stringent requirements for reliability (for example, airplane flight-control systems)?
The technical community is quite skilled at designing, building, testing, and evaluating computer systems that must operate within highly reliable safety-critical applications such as real-time aviation control, air-traffic control, space systems, health-care systems, and so on. It adds significantly to the development costs, but those costs are generally justified by the clearly recognized dangers from having these systems fail. DRE voting systems are not built with anything approaching the level of care that goes into building safety-critical systems. Furthermore, safety-critical systems are not generally designed to be secure against arbitrary misuse or tampering. Election systems need to have the auditing and double-checking features found in ATM systems combined with the reliability achieved in safety-critical systems. That’s a tall order, and current DRE systems give us no reason to believe they achieve this. However, if DRE systems included paper ballot printing, as discussed ab
Related Questions
- Why are electronic election machines different from safety-critical systems with stringent requirements for reliability (for example, airplane flight-control systems)?
- Is it less expensive to conduct an election using electronic voting machines compared to optical scan voting systems?
- Can the machines electronic database be updated as new laser type automotive locking systems hit the market?
