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Touch Screen Voting Industry Circling Wagons
bhoman writes "Salon has an interesting article/interview with the author of a forthcoming book, Black Box Voting, by Bev Harris, that looks at electronic voting machines, especially Diebold touchscreens. The story includes incriminating internal memos, cease and desist orders from Diebold, transcripts of an industry teleconference where Harris Miller of the ITAA brags of his lobbying experience, and documentation of a backdoor via an Access MDB with no password. This is for software currently being used in 37 states. "
I wouldn't use an Access Database as a way of securing my list of CDs, let alone my democracy.
Then again, does Dubya have any more brothers who are governors?
Well, it is called Access after all.
Doesn't it make you glad to be in a country were your democratic views are stored in an unprotected Access Database!
Let's all forward this to Jeb Bush so he can get Florida in order before any more shananigans in 2004!
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Free your mind.
and these touchscreens can have marquee screensavers saying, "This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane."
"Every software in government, which is paid for from citizens taxes, should be open source."
Maybe I'm being a little bit picky here, but I'd prefer the best tool for the job (yes, I am a gov't employee).
That's why, when ballots are counted by hand, no one is allowed to look how they are being counted. You see, when the ballots are counted behind closed doors, the result comes back in under a minute, but when people can inspect the counting, and insist upon a "procedure" being drawn up that everyone can rad, manual counting can take an hour!
Many countries prefer to manually count votes behind closed doors with no published counting procedure. For example, Iraq, China, etc. In fact, in these countries the election results are almost always known even before the elections, that's how efficient it is!
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
but its manufacturer is run by a die-hard GOP donor who vowed to deliver his state for Bush next year
Gee, so from the Republicans' standpoint, what's the problem?
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
If there is no X in a single circle the ballet is spoiled.
and all the dancers get to go home early.
Obviously these people are masters at gathering and implementing requirements from the various governmental entities that would use this.
Requirements:
1: Allow government to edit results
2: Make sure logs can be altered
3: Provide false sense of security
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
Here's my idea: After you vote electronically, you put in your home address, e-mail, and phone number, which can then be given to a 3rd party commercial firm that is charged with verifying everyone's votes. Then, they can mail you a receipt with a listing of your votes, and call you to find out if it was ok with you, and also e-mail you. If you dont' repond to all three means of contact, then your vote isn't counted. As a bonus, you get to receive special offers from their affiliates.
- Donny was a good bowler, and a good man.
. Joe Voter calculates the hash himself and looks for it in the list. If it's not there, someone is playng games. You need the secret string because Joe's name and address are public knowledge.
I can just see it.
Billy joe: "I'LL FEED THE HOGS LATER MARY SUE! I'M CALCULATIN' MAH SH1 HASH CODE!".
Mary sue: "WELL SAVE ME SOME O THAT HASH BILLY JOE! I'M DANG TOOTIN STRAIT AS A POLE RITE NOW".
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
North Canton, Ohio
North Canton is also the home to the Hoover vacuum cleaner company. Perhaps it's a matter where the technology from North Canton just sucks.
Also, the Diebold HQ in North Canton is pretty dinky...perhaps like their exec's wieners. Gee, that was just too low.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Perhaps you should a consider a journalist calling you a conspiracy theorist a compliment?
Much of the "journalism" I see/read/hear lately is utter trash, especially from the big TV and cable networks. The bias there is quite disgusting and appears to be motivated by its entertainment value rather than true newsworthiness (I cite the shark sightings stories, for example--sharks are irrelevant!).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin