If only we had a paper (ballot) trail

I have never trusted paperless electronic voting. When the first electronic machines came out, a state official brought one into my studio. I asked, “If I want to check the machine’s numbers, where do I find the ballots?”

He pointed to a little box; it was the disk drive.

Sadly, the public schools never taught us how to read invisible magnetic blips, so I asked, “How do you do a manual recount?” Answer: you don’t. The computer does it.

Well, as we have all come to learn, a hacked computer will cheerfully obey corrupt software. It could display a vote correctly on the screen, but then record it differently. It could make up any result! Without paper ballots as a backup, there is no way to check.

Here’s why that’s dangerous. On Monday, the website theintercept.com revealed a leaked NSA report which explained how in 2016, Russian intelligence sent out legit-looking emails containing a hack which targeted a particular company that sells voter registration software. The idea might have been to change voter information – to disqualify people from voting.

But here’s the really creepy part: The ultimate goal might have been to infect the vote tabulation software provided by the same company in order to alter the actual votes.

There is no indication they did.

But it would mean that when Vladimir Putin denied trying to hack the vote in his chat with Megyn Kelly, he may have been lying. Which tells me paperless voting is still a bad idea.

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