"Yep. An easier solution is to have a hard printout that is viewable after the voter is finished for postive verification. That way every machine can be verified after the election for monkey business."
I agree completely. If they're going to use computers for voting machines, then a hard copy printout of each voters choices should be an absolute requirement. Let the voter take it home with him/her.
Still, I have no doubt that I could code around all of that and manipulate a tabulation. So could any really competent programmer. Whoever the state will be hiring to look at these programs will have had nothing to do with writing them. Knowing that, I could bury routines to manipulate a tabulation, scattering lines of code throughout the program, making them look like they actually functioned in another routine, but really operating together as a hidden subroutine, doing pretty much whatever I wanted them to do.
Nobody but someone who knew the program could find them. And I doubt if the government is capable of hiring a really competent person to do the review of the code in the first place.
Of course, my programs were written solely by me, and my programming style is, shall we say, unorthodox. One of my applications was over 150,000 lines of code, all uncommented. I didn't need the comments, so I didn't put them in. Over several revisions, the thing got pretty complex, internally. I'm quite certain that not another soul could have figured out how the thing worked.
This was in Visual Basic, up to version 3.0, where you could use undeclared Global variables. The program had over 400 of them. I knew them all, but since they were undeclared, I can't imagine how anyone else would figure it out.
Yes, I'm a sloppy, sloppy programmer. Never mind. That program worked very, very well, and sold quite well, too.
Good lord, no. The potential for fraud in that "voter takes a printout home" is 100%. Imagine a whole bunch of people showing up with slips of paper "proving" the count was off? There will be no chain of custody and therefore the slips cannot be collected to do a recount but an operator sure could trash an election. Don't think the receipts can be counterfeited? Remember that most election fraud involves the workers in the election office. No, optical scan should be the only method allowed as the uniform auditable voting system for all.
Still, I have no doubt that I could code around all of that and manipulate a tabulation. A few years ago IIRC Hughes decided to stop all those with pirated cards for their satellites. Instead of downloading a program that would be caught by the pirates and circumvented, they downloaded small regular updates that included some stray code.
A final update had another bit of code in it that brought all the previous stray code bits together, forming a program that destroyed the card.
It's easy to hide stuff.