The Department of Homeland Security is looking at ways to safeguard electronic voting machines from hackers.

It’s really pretty simple, you eliminate the purely electronic machines, and go with optically scanned machines, which will give you a count in roughly the same time, and then you do a manual recount of a small portion of the precincts.

If you want to retain purely electronic machines, I’d suggest that you require that the software be open source, so that it can be audited.

Instead, they will probably shovel money at Diebold and their ilk:

The Obama administration is weighing new steps to bolster the security of the United States’ voting process against cyberthreats, including whether to designate the electronic ballot-casting system for November’s elections as “critical infrastructure,” Jeh Johnson, the secretary of Homeland Security, said on Wednesday.

In the wake of hacks that infiltrated Democratic campaign computer systems, Mr. Johnson said he was conducting high-level discussions about “election cybersecurity,” a vastly complex effort given that there are 9,000 jurisdictions in the United States that have a hand in carrying out the balloting, many of them with different ways of collecting, tallying and reporting votes.

………

Mr. Johnson said he was considering communicating with state and local election officials across the country to inform them about “best practices” to guard against cyberintrusions, and that longer-term investments would probably have to be made to secure the voting process.

“There are various different points in the process that we have to be concerned about, so this is something that we are very focused on right at the moment,” Mr. Johnson said.

His comments were the latest evidence that recent cyberintrusions have caused alarm in the administration about the potential for hacking to disrupt the election, and how to respond.

Seriously, this sh%$ ain’t rocket science.

Use paper ballots, and make selected public hand recounts of a small randomly selected group of sites.

It’s really that simple.