Text 13153, 63 rader
Skriven 2008-03-18 18:08:09 av Jeff Bowman (1:229/500)
Ärende: Voting Shenanigans
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Time for more suspected foul play in electronic voting machines:
 
http://tinyurl.com/29ujpq
 
Notably, from the article:
 
"Preliminary analysis conducted by specialists from SysTest Labs indicates that
the internal audit capability of the Franklin County voting machines had been
manually disabled by county election board programmers last year, making it
almost impossible to tell if any nefarious changes have been made to the
systems. SysTest also discovered that the election board had failed to adhere
to routine machine testing standards and had tested only one machine in each
precinct rather than all of the machines."  
 
It's bad enough that current electronic voting machines are inherently
insecure, but we've got people like that who only excel at making it worse.
 
Personally I do not want any of the modern electronic voting machines.  None of
them have been proven safe.  In fact, it's quite the opposite.  We've seen how
easily someone can implant a virus into a voting machine via a memory card
(necessary to store votes in the first place), capable of propogating to other
machines, which modifies vote counts internally (affecting the paper print-out
as well as the digital count), and then can delete all trace of itself.  You
can't fight foul play unless you can prove it.
 
Of course, that's not even counting the machines which are made so physically
poorly that you can pop the whole thing open with minimal tools, and actually
replace a chip on the circuit board.
 
When machines are being created so fundamentally insecure, why are we still
paying these companies (like Diebold) to keep making them?  People who have
created example exploitations of the machines have testified in court about
them, even, but most states still employ them in some form or another.  So far,
only like California and Colorado has banned them.  Florida and Ohio may have
as well but I can't say for sure.  But the possible damage is already done,
regardless.
 
If you're a conspiracy theorist, you might assume that certain people want
these machines in operation exactly for such tampering reasons.  I mean hell,
it's already proven that Diebold's own CEO is a active fund raiser for Bush.
It's enough to make anyone wonder.  But if you're not into conspiracies, you
might assume the government is just too dumb to know any better. Regardless, I
don't understand why there's not a group whose responsibility is to thoroughly
evaluate these machines before we employ them on such widescale use. I'm
betting even just moderately skilled security enthusiasts could have found
plenty of things wrong with them.  I would be so bold as to say I probably
could have, based on my own software/hardware experience.
 
So yeah, I pretty much want them gone until we have the "perfect" voting
machine in all areas.  By perfect, I mean one which is in fact electronic, but
shows me on the screen who I voted for after doing so, then prints out a paper
version immediately (not at the end of the day like current ones do) which I
can visually confirm registered my vote appropriately.  I then would turn that
in on the way out. When they do the vote tallies, if the electronic votes don't
equal the paper votes, then they have an obvious inconsistancy which could
indicate foul play.  It would also just offer double accuracy in general.
 
As useless as it might be to vote towards the party I generally support in my
area, I at least want my vote to mean nothing with as much fairness as
possible.

--- D'Bridge 2.99
 * Origin: FyBBS (1:229/500)