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E-voting Patches Skew Election?

Posted by michael on from the many-more-of-these-to-come dept.

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."

2 of 629 comments (clear)

  1. Not the machines fault... by indros13 · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    ...the upset was of course the fault of the "vast right wing conspiracy" that brought all those allegations of sexual misconduct about Clinton to the airwaves...wait, those were true?

    It is fascinating, though, that while the "secret" update to the machines has been exposed, we still can't figure out what "senior administration official" is disclosing the names of covert officials...

    Yeah, I know, I'm (Offtopic, -1), but only because this story is (Redundant, -2).

    --
    Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
  2. What WMD , she was a spy and what about the peace? by burgburgburg · · Score: 2, Offtopic
    A) Which WMD would that be? Where are the stores of biological/chemical weapons that were about to be shared with terrorists/used against Western civilization? Where is the rebuilt nuclear program? Last I checked, none of that has been found. So what the heck are you talking about?

    B) She was not an analyst. She worked in a non-government cover position. She didn't have diplomatic immunity or any other form of official government cover. She was also working at actually finding/stopping the spread of WMD. Now that her employment has been leaked by the administration, everybody who had extensive contacts with this agent will be suspect. These are foreign nationals who helped the US in trying to stop the spread of WMD and we've hurt every one of them. Way to go!

    C) We won the war, but we're quickly losing the peace. Rebuilding the cities while various factions continue to blow them up seems oblivious to the reality of the situation. While I recognize that it does good things for Halliburton and Cheney's stock options, it really isn't the best course of action. And as long as Rumsfeld continues to believe in the operational numbers he's declared are just enough, we won't be in a position to make things better no matter how much the ground troops would like to.