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E-voting Patches Skew Election?
Whammy666 writes "Wired magazine has an interesting story of how the much-maligned Diebold E-voting machines were allegedly secretely patched before Georgia state's 2002 gubernatorial election. The patches were never certified by independent testing authorities or cleared with Georgia election officials. The election produced an upset which ended in a major upset that defied all polls. A Diebold contractor tells a worrysome tale of how close to a third of the machines were crashing or locking up and how his tests showed the machines producing errors up to 25%. There are no paper audit trails with these systems so it's nearly impossible to check for fraud or malfunction after an actual election."
Let's see if I have this right.
A Republican congressman owns a company that sells voting machines
The voting machines are closed source with no audit trail
The voting machines are easily manipulated by anyone with a moderate amount of knowledge of excel
untested and uncertified patches are known to have been placed on voting machines prior to elections
Republicans continue to defy odds and win elections that polls show them losing
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This happened in Alabama in the latest election for our governor. Initial results showed that the incumbant democrat had won the election, then a last minute change in the figures from a district with a republican in charge of election certification swung the election to the Republican. There was no recourse for the democratic incumbant.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Albert Einstein