Following on the heels of New Mexico, which recently mandated that all voting systems in the state use an auditable paper ballot, Maryland has banned the faulty and insecure Diebold voting machines. The legislature has required that the company retro-fit the machines with a paper record of each vote, and also specified changes in security and machine set up to reduce the possibility of vote tampering by those with physical access to the machines.
The Dieblold machines can have their vote count changed by someone with physical access to the machine, and without a paper trail, there is no way to detect the altered votes. It is a great relief that lawmakers have finally begun to make changes. What is unfortunate is that these very same lawmakers wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on faulty systems. Many security experts warned of problems long before the systems went into use.