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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. "
... is for someone to hack a major election. By setting 100% of the vote to some obscure candidate, a very clear message about the validity and security of these voting machines will be made crystal clear. hmm... do they use these in California?
As a matter of fact, yes I *do* trust the government to count the ballots in Florida. They counted them once, and Bush won. They counted them a second time, and Bush still won. Furthermore, this whole myth that Bush lost the popular vote is a bunch of hogwash, since many states simply stopped counting votes once a sufficient victory margin was reached (lead > votes remaining). The goal is to reach a majority vote on the state level so votes can be counted on the electorate level; national counts are irrelevant to winning.
What people forget is that there is a "margin of error" in every election, sort of like a general adder that accounts for the inherhant dishonesty of the vote carriers & counters, and flaws in the voting material itself. For punchcard paper ballots, this works out to about 2.6% error.
That's normally a very good margin, when your candidates win by 15-20% victories, everyone looks the other way at the errors, because they don't matter. In close elections, that's when all the "dirty laundry" comes out, because each candidate needs to scrap together all the votes he or she can.
Many people are calling for a conversion to electronic recording systems, not realizing that there is error in these systems also. I've heard figures anywhere from 2 to 2.4% error, due to vote records "mysteriously" not delivered to be counted in the official ottals, plus interface errors leading to miscast votes. Then there's the issues in voting on "closed" systems -- some states have found voting machines that aren't even programmed correctly. Not exactly the end all solution there.
Then we have the California election on hold because opponents are calling for the installation of electronic balloting systems because a study shows votes will be miscounted... when a few days later, it turns out that the financial backers of the study are the electronic voting manufacturers... jeez, no impropriety here!