A Brief History of Cybercrime and Cyberwarfare - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 390

Computer Voting Fraud
For much of American history, votes were cast anonymously on pieces of paper
and counted by hand by officials appointed by community election commissions.
Close elections or possible errors could be recounted, also by hand. The whole
process of counting was under scrutiny.
There were, of course, opportunities to change the paper ballot results illegally,
such as by forging absentee ballots, by bribing voters, or by registering dead
people. However, since all of these things left paper trails, investigation was pos-
sible.
Starting in about 1974, paper ballots were gradually phased out in favor of elec-
tronic ballots. Sometimes paper ballots with holes or special ink were used as the
inputs, but the tabulations were done by computer. The paper documents provided
backup paper trails if needed.
Later versions of computerized voting did away with paper inputs and used
touchscreens or electronic pens for voting. When this happened, there was no
longer an objective way to recount votes or correct errors.
Sometimes the software used to tabulate votes is treated as proprietary trade
secrets by the voting machine manufacturers. In this case, the algorithms are not
revealed to even the election committees in the communities using the machines.
Voting machines are not the only sources of possible election fraud. Every ten
years, states are required to redistrict, and this is now handled by software. Quite
often, the proposed new districts are overturned by judges or by complaints that
they have bias for or against candidates, usually in favor of incumbents.
Instead of using free federal software, as did most states, Rhode Island paid
about $600,000 for a custom redistricting package, apparently in order to gerry-
mander. The state had to redraw the districts several times due to visible biases,
and it barely made the required submission date.
More recently in elections held in 2012, several candidates for the Rhode Island
General Assembly were accused of inflating their popularity by using ghost re-
spondents to visit their Facebook and Twitter accounts. In other words, either soft-
ware or people were creating visits to Facebook and Twitter that never happened.
There are numerous published instances of voting machine errors, but whether
these are unique or part of a more widespread pattern is difficult to ascertain be-
cause of the lack of any paper trail or backup counting methodology.