One more time, in detail from techdirt <read>
the security model of an ATM is totally different from the security model of a voting machine. The most important line of defense against ATM fraud is not the machines themselves, but the fact that they produce a lengthy paper trail. If a hacker breaks into a bank’s network and transfers funds from someone else’s account to his own, two important things will happen.
It is the likelihood that fraud will be detected and punished, not the inherent unhackability of the machines themselves, that makes ATMs secure. In contrast, nobody knows what the “right” election outcome is supposed to be, so there’s no one in a position to object if the results get altered. And because peoples’ votes have to be kept secret, voting machines can’t create the same kind of personally-identifiable paper trails that ATMs do. Unlike stolen cash, a stolen election doesn’t need to be physically delivered to the beneficiary, so there’s no way to trace the loot to find the perpetrator…
There’s a more fundamental issue that should be especially familiar to the folks at the University of Chicago: banks have much stronger incentives to get things right than election officials. If a criminal succeeds in knocking off an ATM machine, the bank that owns that ATM machine stands to lose a lot of money.
