[dpark]

Part of the problem is that the incentives are skewed. Visa has incentives to have a strong auditing trail and to perform constant audits because they bear part of the cost for fraud. Merchants are also heavily incented to carefully manage credit card data, because they are responsible for bearing much of the cost of fraud.

What are the incentives for voting machine manufacturers to do a good job? Engineering a trustworthy system is tough, and it's expensive. If the machines cost twice as much, no one will buy them and it won't matter if they're more secure. And the market itself is unhealthy. If you spend 10 million on voting machines, you won't replace them the next year even if a bunch of security issues surface. You'll "demand" the company fix them, they'll issue some half assed patch, and you'll go on using the junk you bought.