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Monday, May 22, 2006

Republicans are unpopular, so NOW the MSM decides to wake up about voting machines
Posted by Jill | 1:21 PM
It's about freakin' time:

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the voting booth, here comes more disturbing news about the trustworthiness of electronic touchscreen ballot machines. Earlier this month a report by Finnish security expert Harri Hursti analyzed Diebold voting machines for an organization called Black Box Voting. Hursti found unheralded vulnerabilities in the machines that are currently entrusted to faithfully record the votes of millions of Americans.

How bad are the problems? Experts are calling them the most serious voting-machine flaws ever documented. Basically the trouble stems from the ease with which the machine's software can be altered. It requires only a few minutes of pre-election access to a Diebold machine to open the machine and insert a PC card that, if it contained malicious code, could reprogram the machine to give control to the violator. The machine could go dead on Election Day or throw votes to the wrong candidate. Worse, it's even possible for such ballot-tampering software to trick authorized technicians into thinking that everything is working fine, an illusion you couldn't pull off with pre-electronic systems. "If Diebold had set out to build a system as insecure as they possibly could, this would be it," says Avi Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer-science professor and elections-security expert.

Diebold Election Systems spokesperson David Bear says Hursti's findings do not represent a fatal vulnerability in Diebold technology, but simply note the presence of a feature that allows access to authorized technicians to periodically update the software. If it so happens that someone not supposed to use the machine—or an election official who wants to put his or her thumb on the scale of democracy—takes advantage of this fast track to fraud, that's not Diebold's problem. "[Our critics are] throwing out a 'what if' that's premised on a basis of an evil, nefarious person breaking the law," says Bear.

Those familiar with the actual election process—by and large run by honest people but historically subject to partisan politicking, dirty tricks and sloppy practices—are less sanguine. "It gives me a bit of alarm that the voting systems are subject to tampering and errors," says Democratic Rep. William Lacy Clay, who worries that machines in his own St. Louis district might be affected by this vulnerability. (In Maryland and Georgia, all the machines are Diebold's.)


"A bit of alarm"??? This should be setting the hair on fire of everyone who cares about the integrity of the right of franchise in this country.

So what would it take to rig an election once machines are certified? All you need to do is send "authorized technicians" into select precincts, perhaps once exit polls are starting to show, oh, say, a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives, to "install a software update" which just happens to take every "n"th vote for the Democratic candidate and count it as a vote for the Republican.

Washington Democrats, the DNC, DLC, DCCC and DSCC have all been curiously silent on this issue for the last six years, even though there is at least some evidence that vote tampering played a role in the 2000 and 2004 presidential races, as well as the 2002 midterm elections. Whether it's because they and the Republicans are really all on the same team, or willful technological ignorance, or simply no time to deal with it, this is a very real problem, and pretending it doesn't exist is a sure path a generation of elections just like 2000 and 2004.
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