As I am starting the process to write this I am visiting New York City where this afternoon I enjoyed sort of a man-on-the-street interview with a local whose attention was attracted by my hat.
Over cups of coffee my new friend and I found ourselves agreeing completely that (1) Mexico is a great place and (2) the technical side of U.S. elections is a huge mess.
Like me, the New Yorker is involved in the tech industry, albeit neither one of us in the technical side of ensuring secure elections. We were both aware that electronic voting machines used all over the U.S. have made us a laughing stock among the world’s other democracies. Here in an earlier column or two I have detailed how every year there is a computer hacker’s convention named Defcon in Las Vegas where white-hat hackers show off their expertise, many auditioning for jobs in the computer security field. They try to hack voting machines, actually in an effort to demonstrate where improvements in security are needed. In one competition, 35 out of the 39 participants in the 6-17 year old age group succeeded. Every single voting machine was hacked, and hacked by children!
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