Absence of evidence

Heard an interesting thing on the news today. It spoke of the
before-the-election controversy about “black box voting” — electronic
voting machines that were proven to be easy to tamper with.

Anyway, the comment was along the lines of “despite concerns about the
security of these machines, use of them went off with only scattered
problems.”

See, the problem was never that they would be hard to use. The problem
that I and others brought up was that they could be tampered with —
that someone could possibly change the votes. And no one would know.

So saying that no one detected any problems doesn’t mean a thing. The
machines and their workings are, for the most part, hidden from all but
the programmers at the companies that made them. There is no way for us
to know whether there were any problems with these things.

To take an extreme example: What if a machine was programmed to change
every 50th vote for Jones into a vote for Smith? Voters would cast their
ballots for Jones, but one in 50 would have his choice changed.
Invisibly. If interviewed on TV he would say, “It went off without a
hitch,” never knowing what changed behind the scenes.

This strikes me as the media confusing an outward appearance of normalcy
with proof that all is well inside. It may be fine; the machines may
have performed flawlessly. /But there’s no way to know./