Volkswagen and the Era of Cheating Software
And cheating on crucial standards is more than slight misconduct. In 1999, in the aftermath of a major earthquake in Turkey, I walked on mangled streets lined by a zigzagged skyline: Some buildings had collapsed into twisted heaps while others next to them stood tall. A seasoned earthquake rescuer explained to me how survival could be so random. Some of the builders cheated on the codes for concrete — too much sand, no interconnecting metal rods to keep the columns in place. Just this month, a powerful earthquake in Chile — where strict building regulations are properly enforced — killed about 20 people, while 17,000 perished in Turkey’s 1999 earthquake.
.. For voting machines that do not have an auditable paper trail, that means “parallel testing” — randomly selecting some machines on Election Day, and voting on them under observation to check their tallies. It is otherwise too easy for the voting machine software to behave perfectly well on all days of the year except, say, Nov. 8, 2016.