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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!
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
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
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