[LINK] Will The Next Election Be Hacked?

brd at iimetro.com.au brd at iimetro.com.au
Wed Nov 1 16:20:15 AEDT 2006


It's amazing where you find stuff these days

Will The Next Election Be Hacked?
Fresh disasters at the polls -- and new evidence from an industry insider --
prove that electronic voting machines can't be trusted
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11717105/robert_f_kennedy_jr__will_the_next_election_be_hacked/print

The debacle of the 2000 presidential election made it all too apparent to most
Americans that our electoral system is broken. And private-sector 
entrepreneurs
were quick to offer a fix: Touch-screen voting machines, promised the industry
and its lobbyists, would make voting as easy and reliable as withdrawing cash
from an ATM. Congress, always ready with funds for needy industries, swiftly
authorized $3.9 billion to upgrade the nation's election systems - with 
much of
the money devoted to installing electronic voting machines in each of 
America's
180,000 precincts. But as midterm elections approach this November, electronic
voting machines are making things worse instead of better. Studies have
demonstrated that hackers can easily rig the technology to fix an election -
and across the country this year, faulty equipment and lax security have
repeatedly undermined election primaries. In Tarrant County, Texas, electronic
machines counted some ballots as many as six times, recording 100,000 more
votes than were actually cast. In San Diego, poll workers took machines home
for unsupervised "sleepovers" before the vote, leaving the equipment 
vulnerable
to tampering. And in Ohio - where, as I recently reported in "Was the 2004
Election Stolen?" [RS 1002], dirty tricks may have cost John Kerry the
presidency - a government report uncovered large and unexplained discrepancies
in vote totals recorded by machines in Cuyahoga County.

Even worse, many electronic machines don't produce a paper record that can be
recounted when equipment malfunctions - an omission that practically invites
malicious tampering. "Every board of election has staff members with the
technological ability to fix an election," Ion Sancho, an election supervisor
in Leon County, Florida, told me. "Even one corrupt staffer can throw an
election. Without paper records, it could happen under my nose and there is no
way I'd ever find out about it. With a few key people in the right places, it
would be possible to throw a presidential election."

.... lots snipped

-- 
Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Sydney Australia
brd at iimetro.com.au


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