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."

Comments

This is a disaster

[FunWithHeadlines]

"She said the practice of patching systems after they've been certified opens the possibility for anyone -- from Diebold employees to local election officials -- to install malicious code on a machine that could alter election results and then delete itself to avoid detection."

Elections in this, and many other countries, have a long history of fraud. The obtaining of power is so important to some people they will do whatever is necessary to get and maintain it. You can be certain that if there is a way to manipulate results without detection, the temptation will be too great. Countless examples riddle American election history, and yes, from both major parties.

But this is the worst of all. Closed-sourced, buggy, patched (with what? we don't know) after certification electronic voting machines represent power without accountability. Read that again: Power without accountability. That is a recipe for disaster. All you have to do is patch things your way and, voila, you get some "odd" election results that contradict all the polls, but who cares? You're in power now, baby!

This is a huge story, and I'm glad to see Wired covering it. But this belongs on the front page of every newspaper in the country, and on every evening newscast. Why don't we see it there? Ask yourself who owns these voting machine companies. Now ask yourself who owns the mainstream media companies. Connect the dots.

amazing how Republicans keep winning elections...

[sireasoning]

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.