A Federal judge has decided that he disagrees with @jhalderm on the technical details of an electronic voting machine in PA. Let’s see what’s going on. electionlawblog.org/wp-content/upl…
The device is weird in that it produces a voter verifiable paper audit trail, as required by PA. This is a card that looks like this: 
What’s obvious is that the machine prints this card and allows the user to verify the human-readable votes. But that these are not what’s tallied. The machine tallies the barcodes, which aren’t human-readable.
Then, after a person has verified the card, the machine does something weird. It then passes the card *back past the print head* before storing it in a compartment for later audits and recounts. @jhalderm testified that a hacked machine could potentially alter the vote.
I have to admit that this seems a little dodgy. It means that the vote recorded could differ in various ways, both in the human-recorded vote as well as the barcode. The judge rejects this, however. Why? Well this part is frankly confusing.
The judge says, essentially, that to alter the card — the printer would have to be re-installed to allow it to print “in reverse”.
I’m having trouble parsing this, so I may be wrong, but if I read this correctly: the judge believes that the thermal printer software can not be altered to perform the task of printing things *upside down*.
Now it’s entirely possible that the nature of these thermal printers is such that they can only print in one direction — even with altered software. However, there’s no testimony cited that would support this.
The Judge then points out that the ballots are very crowded and don’t leave much room for new entries to be added. This, again, seems like the sort of thing malicious software could alter.
The rest of the opinion is the typical “can you prove that malicious software has done this before?” (no, that’s not how this works) and “there’s no possible way you could infect a bunch of voting machines” stuff we’ve seen before, and @jhalderm has done a lot to debunk.
In any case, my expectation is that the next step here is predictable: Alex will get hold of one of these machines in his lab and show how it can, in fact, be easily modified to do all these bad things. Because he’s got a pretty good track record of doing this in the past.
