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I know none of this comes as a shock to anyone reading /. but when will it escape being a truism and start being a concern for voters!?

When there's a qualifying exam for voting, like there should be for parenting.

Yes, I realize there's a whole other can of worms there. But, I just learned that two companies (Diebold and ESS) count 80% of all votes in the US. The punch line? The owners of both companies are brothers. (Actually, one is president, the other is a VP.)

Democracy is dead.

Oh, and don't expect to see close races like the last two. Nor 99-100% like Saddam received. It'll be 60/40 in Republican favor: that's not a landslide, and it's also not "too close" to receive support for a recount.

I wish I was joking.

It was one CEO making a fundrasing pitch in a letter!

Go check this to see where the sympathies of the voting machine companies lie. Any claims of non-partisanship on the part of the companies should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

the company in question makes about 1% of its profit from voting machines, is very transparent and publically traded. Hardly a good candidate for fruad

Best kind of candidate, if you think about it. How much money they make is a non-issue. I don't care how much they make - what I'm worried about is how they handle the election.

This type of question has been around for 200 years.

Sure. But now we can ask it loudly until someone actually answers the damn question! We have at our hands a tool to make sure it gets in front of as many faces as possible. So why not use it?

The more shrill you side gets the more offended, turned off, and disgusted the middle 20% of votes in the country get.

So, what? Just shut up and take it? In case you hadn't noticed, moderation doesn't go over with this administration. Bush was the one who said "You are either with us, or against us." So, I'm coming down on the side specifically against him and his fellow Republiban.

Perhaps you haven't heard... Diebold is a huge supporter of the Republican party, and I'm sure they have more than enough friends in office right now (including Dubya, to whom Diebold's CEO has promised to deliver the state of Ohio). I'd be surprised if anything actually comes of this in anywhere besides California (if anything even happens there).

The Republicans are SET on making sure that our votes are "counted" by going to electronic voting, and it's something that they want to tightly control. Hell, they walked out - WALKED OUT - of a federal hearing on voting machines.

Being a linux geek, I'm all for new technologies being used to make out lives easier, but there are too many special interests and flaws in the current method of E-Voting. The vast majority of E-Voting companies are really just one company that supports a biased outcome to the elections. Not to mention the fact that most of the E-Voting-Machines run M$. The state of E-Voting in america is really bad...

From http://www.ecotalk.org/VotingSecurity.htm: If people are voting on machines, they are not voting at all. In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court said that, A "legal vote," as determined by the Supreme Court, is "one in which there is a 'clear indication of the intent of the voter.'" If a machine is involved in the voting process, the voter has been relegated to making inputs and hoping that the machines' output is the same. That output can only be 'circumstantial' evidence of what the voter intended. It is the voters' right to create 'real' evidence of their own intention.
peace

Granted counting by hand can't provide instantanious results, but Canada counts their ballots by hand at the precinct, allowing them to complete their national ballot count in only four hours.

The REALLY useful thing computers allow you to do, (if implimented properly), is eliminate rejected ballots, since it can do error checking before submitting the ballot. Canada's hand counted ballots had a ~1.1% rejection rate: a rather low percentage, but it amounts to nearly 140,000 votes that didn't get counted.

Well since you mentioned it... when the Diebold source code was originally posted on a site in NZ, over 120 .mil domains downloaded the full motherload....

Plus... as soon as you look a bit closer at these monkey voting software companies you will find that many of them are practically military already.

Most notably VoteHere the makers of the crypto-receipt stalking horse solution to this crisis have a Admiral Owens, former Naval Chief of staff as their Chairman (he also happens to be a Senior VP of SAIC which did the security report for Maryland), and former CIA chief Robert Gates on the board.

So think very carefully, do you really want the military writing the code that manages the US ballot box?

Exit polls are not at all a replacement for proper auditin and verification, but they at least (used to) provide a big picture view that helped to highlight any major problems in vote counting. (cough Florida cough)

From the original posting:

The report notes that 'SAIC has identified several high-risk vulnerabilities [...]'

The first and last of your points apply to any The first and last of your criticisms apply to any system that uses paper ballots, and as some of the entries on this list show, electronic voting isn't immune to "lost" or lost votes, or to incorrect couting.
As for people marking more than one candidate, well, anyone who's too dumb to understand "mark one candidate's name only" (or similar instructions) is pretty much beyond helping.