speaking of disgusting, how about the upcoming trainwreck called electronic voting machines? (let's not even get into the corruption of other aspects of elections.) some of this may be over your heads, but suffice it to say that these voting machines violate countless data auditing and security standards:

GEMS receives the incoming votes and stores them in a vote ledger. But then, we found, it makes another set of books with a copy of what is in vote ledger 1. And at the same time, it makes yet a third vote ledger with another copy.

The Elections Supervisor never sees these three sets of books. All she sees is the reports she can run: Election summary (totals, county wide) or a detail report (totals for each precinct). She has no way of knowing that her GEMS program is using multiple sets of books, because the GEMS interface draws its data from an Access database, which is hidden.

And here is what is quite odd: On the programs we tested, the Election summary (totals, county wide) come from the vote ledger 2 instead of vote ledger 1.

Now, think of it like this: You want the report to add up ONLY the ACTUAL votes. But, unbeknownst to the election supervisor, votes can be added and subtracted from vote ledger 2, so that it may or may not match vote ledger 1. Her official report comes from vote ledger 2, which has been disengaged from vote ledger 1.

If she asks for a detailed report for some precincts, though, her report comes from vote ledger 1. Therefore, if you keep the correct votes in vote ledger 1, a spot check of detailed precincts (even if you compare voter-verified paper ballots) will always be correct.

From a programming standpoint, there might be reasons to have a special vote ledger that disengages from the real one. From an accounting standpoint, using multiple sets of books is NOT OKAY. From an accounting standpoint, the ONLY thing the totals report should add up is the original votes in vote ledger 1. Proper bookkeeping NEVER allows an extra ledger that can be used to just erase the original information and add your own. And certainly, it is improper to have the official reports come from the second ledger, the one which may or may not have information erased or added.