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Will the Next Election Be Hacked?
plasmacutter writes to let us know about the new article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in Rolling Stone, following up on his "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" (slashdotted here). Kennedy recounts the sorry history of electronic voting so far in this country — and some of the incidents will be new even to this clued-in crowd. (Had you heard about the CERT advisory on an undocumented backdoor account in a Diebold vote-tabulating database — crediting Black Box Voting?) Kennedy's reporting is bolstered by the accounts of a Diebold insider who has gone on record with his concerns. From the article: 'Chris Hood remembers the day in August 2002 that he began to question what was really going on in Georgia... "It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state," Hood told me. "We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from [president of Diebold election unit Bob] Urosevich...' According to Hood, Diebold employees altered software in some 5,000 machines in DeKalb and Fulton counties, the state's largest Democratic strongholds. The tally in Georgia that November surprised even the most seasoned political observers. (Hint: Republicans won.)
Why can't you just get it through your head
It's over, it's over now
Yes, you heard me clearly now I said
It's over, it's over now
I'm not really over you
You might say that
I can't take it, I can't take it
Lord, I swear I just can't take it no more
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
exit polls.
they have always been acurate to a very slim margin, yet they were off by hundreds of thousands of votes in 2004. think about it - oh wait sorry, the apathy, i forgot.
You'd think with the evidence and coincidences that are showing up, that people may actually think these guys have something it say. Instead, some of you just dismiss it as BS. I'm a card carrying libertarian, and I'm siding with the liberals on this one. There's something fishy going on here, and I think it should be investigated.
I wonder, if the positions were reversed and you felt you were losing your country, would you:
A. Still give a fuck?
B. Be outraged that fellow citizens don't listen to you, just because they have a different stance on abortion?
Take a quick peak at the url. Oh! politics.slashdot.org! What kinda dumbfuck wouldda guessed that this particular section would contain politics?
FFS, even the motto is different.
Don't like seeing it on the FP?
Uncheck the option. Some of you fuckers are too dumb to even be here, and that's saying a lot.
Absoutely. There will be wide margins in exit polls for Democrats and the Republicans will win anyway. They'll blatantly steal it and dare us to say it was stolen.
See, they've already tested the waters on the "will anyone believe an election is stolen" question. (Whether the 2004 election was stolen or not.) They know the general public will not believe it to be stolen, no matter how compelling the evidence.
So 2006 is a wash.
It also doesn't matter who wins. The losing side will claim the winners stole the election. I fail to see how electronic voting has changed this. It is being going on for a long time.
Actually, a few weeks back, Slashdot covered how Maryland Governor Ehrlich (R) was trying to seek an injunction on the use of Diebold machines.
The reality of the situation is that it's not a Democrat/Republican thing.....it's a power thing. If a Democrat were in office, the Republicans would be shouting vote fraud, etc.
Hey, don't offer evidence contrary to the standing line of crap around slashdot... we're not really interested in proof... We just support our own little fantasies and make up things to make ourselves feel good.
I don't mind the idea of electronic voting, just be sure to give me a printout of my vote in plain english with a tracking number so that I can validate it later on. We cannot just take them at their word on this. This is one of the few cases where I think a paper trail is a must!
2 left biased politcal stories on the frontpage, I wonder how much karma conservatives are gonna lose today. By modding conservative posts as a troll, you admit that you are afraid of the truth.
Considering there is no unbiased proof (yes, speculation and people pushing an overly biased agenda don't count) that the 2006 election was stolen, I doubt there is any point to discussing whether the next one will be. No system is perfect and there is always room for improvement, but there is a line between constructive comments and conspiracy theories.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
The slant is so obvious.
Always the conservatives are screaming about "balance." Reality itself is not "fair and balanced." The Republicans are destroying the country, the environment, and the Earth. Not the Democrats. So get over it. The very notion that media needs to be "balanced" is how we got into this position in the first place.
Media is supposed to report on what is happening. Not make you feel better about your political views if they suck, or make you feel as though you're just as good as everyone else if you're not.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Only a nonpartisan, centrist voice like Robert F. Kennedy is unbiased enough to announce that only the Republicans engage in voter fraud, trickery, and manipulation. There's no corruption in the Democratic party - hasn't Air America Radio taught us anything?
:/
Another great article, kdawson.
We just don't give a fuck. The Prime Minister of Hungary is caught admitting to lying to the public about the economy on tape and Hungarians are out RIOTING (including tear gas!) in the streets. Our President has all but been caught lying about everything, royally fucking up everthing he's touched in the process, and the best we can muster is Bill Clinton, Richard Clarke, and Cindy Sheehan.
In that case, might I recommend that Americans bring in the Swiss in order that they may have a supervised election run by an impartial third party? Given that the US has such a hard time ensuring fair elections, they shouldn't be too proud to ask for help.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I find it really ironic that a Kennedy, of all people, should be warning people about election fraud.
Especially with what happened in Chicago when "John F" was "elected".
And I find it particularly sad that the people who are warning about election fraud don't want to do a damn thing to prevent people from voting twice (or more....Just witness what happens in Wisconsin).
Don't want fraud? Simple: Give people free state-issued id cards, and make them prove who they are when they vote. Do it by paper ballot. And enforce the election fraud laws when someone is caught tampering with ballots.
Other countries at least make you dip your finger in ink that lasts a few days when they vote. They should at least do that here.
Electronic voting removes what semblance of vote verifiability existed with paper votes (real recounts) while enabling easy, broad tampering.
Raising funds / winning elections. There is a cause/effect relationship here folks. Wake up, smell the roses, elections are just like anything else in america, sold to the highest offer. If that wasn't the case, then fund raising wouldn't be the most critical part of an election campaign.
If you have a tracking number, there is the possibility that voters can be bought or threatened into voting a certain way.
I tell you that unless you vote for Mr. X, I will break your legs. You go vote and I demand your tracking number (or I break your legs anyway). I can verify that you voted how I wanted you to.
The best paper trail is for the voting machine to spit out a form/card/whatever with the name of the person you voted for printed/punched on it. Then you drop that into a locked box. Later, that locked box is opened in front of anyone who wants to watch and the votes are sorted and counted.
We have the technology to do that already.
But it seems that having an easily verifiable paper trail is not something that our politicians are interested in.
I don't care what political party you are in (or which party you hate).
Honest elections should NOT be a political issue. It should be a PATRIOTIC issue.
We need a list of requirements for honest elections and we, THE PEOPLE, need to work with each other to get them implemented.
I don't care if you're Liberal or Republican or Libertarian or Communist or Green. I will gladly work with you for honest elections in America. You may beat my favoured Party, but we should all be able to see that it was an honest election and an honest victory.
because we all know how unbiased and meticulous the press is.
How do you know it was actually democrats who were opposing him.. is this like the "democrats" who screwed up the response to katrina.. you know.. the democratic governor who was somehow magically in charge of fema..
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
newsflash: republicans see democrats destroying the moral foundation of the country, selling us out to international law via the court system, pandering for votes from illegals, wanting to destroy any successful corporation, etc.
The difference is that you see the things you disagree with, while the things you agree with you tend to gloss over. Most right wingers see CNN, NPR, BBC, etc as liberal (while most leftists call them neutral) and most liberals call Fox conservative (while most rightists call it neutral). It's all about hearing what you agree with MOST of the time and letting it reinforce your ideas.
Frankly, Slashdot is going further and further to the left... and while my post count is up lately from trying to point out the lunacy, it's growing very tiring and is pushing me away from wanting to even participate here. It's to the point where the Bush bashing and conspiracy theories creep into non-political stories. I haven't been to kuroshin in years for the same reason. If slashdot wants to turn into the next DU, that's fine... but don't be too surprised when all you have left is a bunch of people preaching to the choir and another bunch trolling.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
No, the Democrats lose because the party has not been able to put up someone inspiring (or hell, electable) since Clinton (Or arguably JFK). Say what you want about Clinton or Regan, they both inspired people, and both convinced the majority of voters (not tiny contestable majority either) to get the job. Bush sucks, but he keeps his job because (1) his opponents have somehow managed to be less appealing than him and (2) the Democrat party has basically become the "oppose Bush" party. No real ideas of their own, no "contract with America" style plan to recapture the votes, just oppose Bush at every turn. Don't get me wrong, if Bush and co keep screwing up that eventually will work, but he probably could have been easily beaten (election fraud or not) if there were some kind of leadership or direction in the Democratic party.
Finkployd
Yea, because polling places have NEVER "lost" ballot boxes. Pffft.
sarcasm start:
let's see.. which one is easier to do and harder to detect:
1 - coordinate hundreds or thousands of people to drag off huge ballot boxes across the entire nation
2 - someone in some central location makes a virus which they have a friend smuggle in and install on all ballot boxes.. or they just press a button in the central office and BAM.. all votes swap from bush to kerry!..
yep.. it's soo much less difficult to do the former than the latter..
end sarcasm..
begin WoW.. oops sorry.. you didnt need to know that.. lol
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Sometimes it seems to me that the Neocons (I was raised Republican, still hold those values, and consider myself to be a moderate, but in today's spectrum that makes me a liberal. But I still don't want to sully the 'Republican' label.) have taken the liberal concept of 'cultural relativism' and run with it, convincing themselves that 'factual relativism' is real and applicable to the world.
But IMHO 'cultural relativism' is/was primarily a tool to help you understand the other guy, his roots, motivations, etc, so that you can deal with him. Applying either 'relativism' to your own actions in the real world tends to be an exercise in wishful thinking, and sometimes that can be disastrous.
There seems to be a new (I'll call it) 'Neocon meme' showing up on Slashdot and other net sites, with a couple of notable characteristics:
* This site just has a liberal slant, and you'll shout me down for this.
* The Republicans may have some problems, but the Democrats are just as bad.
* The nation as a whole is politically much different from this site.
Oh, well.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Rigging elections undermines everything this country stands for. It is, in a very real definition of the word, treason. Anyone doing it. Anyone ordering it. Anyone knowing about it and not coming forward. Anyone who has taken an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States, has to take rigged elections as a direct challenge to the authority of that document. As a military person you took an oath to protect the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Someone rigging the ballot box would qualify as a domestic enemy.
That should be one thing we can all agree on. Democrat, Republican, Independent or any other party. Without fair elections we are no longer the United States of America. We are something less.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
You may be right... there may be nothing to this but paranoia and sour grapes on the part of Democrats that lost.
But with Diebold style machines, how can anyone ever prove otherwise? With no paper trail, this issue is going to come up in every single election. The loser will claim that the election was stolen, and there will be no way for anyone to prove that it didn't happen.
That's why we need systems where the results are open to public inspection/recount and difficult to hack. Paper ballots meet this criteria. Electronic machines with a voter-verified paper trail meet this criteria. Diebold machines do not. Even if we assumed that every person involved with those machines was in fact 100% honest and above cheating, they'd still be unusable as an electoral mechanism, because every election result would be suspect.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The losing side will claim the winners stole the election.
There was time that I would've said this was too cynical, but reading the absolute nonsense from people who believe in this "conspiracy" makes me think that people really will believe anything to avoid the truth that the guy they didn't want actually won.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
They work fine for you, and I'm sure the exit polls match the results(go lula), but in the first world of the USA, electronic voting just makes it easier to cheat. The CEO of the electronic voting company(Diebold) actually guaranteed a republican win, it's that bad. They have manipulated the people via the press so we now think that exit polling is inaccurate. This ensures there is no oversight over electronic voting - exit polls are the only oversight we have. We use exit polls to determine fraudulant elections in places like Ukraine, but in the United States, we're worse off than Ukraine.
In many ways it's shameful, but politics in the U.S. is fierce and divided moreso than most other countries. The arrogant international attitude you see also applies to domestic politics. It's anything goes here and it's very machiavellian - whatever it takes to win will be done.
Not even talking about gerrymandering. Even if the democrats make significant gains, they will need 57% of popular vote to take the lower house. This should be 50% but due to gerrymandering, democrats have almost insurmountable odds. The U.S. is a banana republic.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
It sounds like you're more neoconservative than conservative. If that's the case, there's no stopping you from embarking on your journey to find the bible infested, immigrant free, raise the deficit like it's going out of style, grass is greener forums.
Since when should a conservative care what a citizens sexual preference is? Since when should a conservative spend considerable amounts of money on it? Since when should a conservative care where the citizens of its nation come from? Since when *shouldn't* a (fiscal) conservative care about the ungodly amounts of money the nation gives out as 100% uncooked bacon to gigantic, inefficient and incompetent organizations?
First, the republicans do not see the democrats as destroying the moral foundations. It is the neo-cons that claim that. It is these neo-cons that have such representations as Foley, Abramhoff, Hassert, Delay, Cheney, Bush, and Rumsfield.
/. heading left, you have to be kidding. I am a very long time libertarian (and actually more conservative than those that are in my freaks lists), and I can tell you that it is NOT heading left. Not compared to what we had just 9-10 years ago, or even 6 years ago. I see shit loads of neo-cons here. In fact, I feel like I am on foxnews these days. and fox is not conservative; it is propaganda along the line of Pravda (news intermixed with what a group of ppl want to preach).
As to
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Electronic voting machines without a printer attached make it impossible to have a proper recount if claims of ballot tampering are substantiated.
Electronic voting isn't prima facie more vulnerable than previous voting methods; rather it's the current crop of voting machines that are poorly engineered that's the problem.
The problem is, if it takes a 13 page paper to explain it, it's too complicated to explain to Joe & Jane voter.
I'm going to go with the path of least resistence here and say, "Because there's nothing to report."
Uh, no, wait...
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Things to consider:
1) Both the 2000 and 2004 elections were VERY close. They ultimately came down a to a relatively thin margin of votes in select states. So we basically get into an uncertainty situation because we end up having to measure a vote exactly when the technology is rather imprecise (hanging chads, etc)
2) Electronic voting machines did not exist in significant quantities prior to the 2000 election. Given that there's no physical evidence to support the numbers that come out of the polls, it creates a definite sense of insecurity.
3) We have seen ample evidence of deliberate efforts by Republicans to distort the vote. In Ohio there were many fewer polling machines made available to typically Democratic districts. They also gave people registration forms that were invalid, then said they wouldn't accept them. Also don't forget the phone bank jamming scheme in New Hampshire that hamstrung get out the vote efforts by Democrats.
4) Gerrymandering of districts has meant that the margins of victory have shrunk in many locations. You gerrymander by dividing up opposition support accross enough of your own candidates. So you end up with two of your candidates winning by say 5% rather than having one win by 10% and the other narrowly lose.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Rest of the Planet to Americans: Put down the nuclear weapons and step away from the maifest destiny.
You are no longer worthy.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Ah, but you're forgetting current and future administrations' policies affect foreign relations. There are no neutral parties, locally OR overseas.
I like this:
Generally, I applaud your ability to see in perspective.
I hate printers.
I'm sure you'll appreciate that I'm sending over Vinnie here to help you fill out that absentee ballot and get it in the mailbox.
The ballots can be so confusing, and I'd hate to think what would happen if you made a mistake and voted for the wrong candidates.
Ain't that right, Vinnie?
*grin*
an interesting method of creating a secure paper trail
It's certainly interesting, but completely impractical. If people can't reliably punch a hole in a card, there's no way they can be expected to correctly follow these directions:
There isn't going to be any more "elections".
If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator. GWB. CNN.com, December 18, 2000
You americans are fucked now... the rest of us will be fucked later.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
How is that not treason?
How we know is more important than what we know.
You have a votes that need to be counted. What difference does the system of goverment make?
When Edison first made an vote counting machine, the patent office rejected his invention citing concerns that could lead to vote tampering and yet, over a hundred years later, we have all of these problems...Maybe we should just GET RID OF ELECTRONIC VOTING until somebody can make uncrackable DRM software.
Even if you created magical, unhackable software, the hardware tiself is still hackable.
Give me a nice budget, and I'll make you some chips that look just like normal, but have some extra special functionality that is effectively undetectable without depackaging the chip.
In short: Electrons are not visible with the naked eye and as such should not be a critical part of the voting process.
Life is too short to proofread.
Nice troll moderation there. At least argue the point.
1. Centralized voting means you only need to corrupt small number of people to corrupt an election.
2. Decentralized voting means you need to corrupt many, many people to substantially change an election result.
3. The US has a history of centralizing its vote counting, using techniques such as moving ballot boxes to central counting locations, and using electronic means to centralize counting.
Given the amount of noise about appearance of fraud in US elections, why isn't vote counting de-centralized? Other democracies seem to manage.
Regardless, he was popular through a lot of his two terms.
Granted I didn't like him. But I did not like him because he expanded the power of the executive branch greatly through executive orders, he bombed a couple of countries for no good reason, he displayed absolutely no respect for privacy with the Clipper chip initiative, and his staff was mired in conflict of interest, incompetence, and other questionable activities.
Imagine how I feel about Bush...
Finkployd
Paper records aren't some magic bullet to solve the issue of recounts. Paper is corruptable; this is a return to the problems that electronic voting was supposed to solve.
What happens when the count is different? Which is to believed? The perfect, digital count that could be intentionally flubbed or the subject-to-significant-error hand count of corruptable marks on paper?
The 2000 election was decided within the margin of error for paper methods. Digital counts deliver us from this problem, but the paper record put us right back.
Its a faux democracy, just like the all the african dicatorships that call themselves 'democratic republic of foobaristan', those ones where armed militia force citizens to 'vote' at gunpoint. And the suburbs with voters belonging to the opposition parties mysteriously catch fire on polling day.
In the last week George Bush had both houses pass laws giving him the authority to order the abduction and torture of american citizens indefinately, based on his word alone. He also had laws passed that retroactively exempt him from being charged with war crimes and terrorist offenses from 2001 onward.
When any citizen can be abducted by the state and tortured to death 'legally', then that state is a defacto dictatorship regardless of how elections are held, or if they're even held at all. In 5 years America has gone from a democratic state in which liberties are treasured and upheld, to a state teetering on the brink of a facist, fundamentalist and terrorist run nightmare nation of despots and villians. Whats it going to be like 5 years from now?
You're right! RFK is a rat so statistics are no longer meaningful!
Look at what's happening in Europe as the muslims are flooding in and reproducing faster than the natives. Pretty soon, you'll see them adopting Sharia there. If you want to see a country become destabilized as they lose the core values that binds them all together, good luck in the ensuing anarchy.
Way to sound like a bigot. More importantly, this is what societies do, you know? Things change. Demographics change. Some people reproduce quickly, others slowly. As populations shift, practices and policies shift. That's called (drumroll) democracy. Sorry to burst your bubble, I know you thought democracy was this violent, totalitarian stuff that Bush was promoting, but no, it's just policies more or less following the lead of changes in the population.
The "core values that bind them all together" that you refer to... You would preserve these, work to keep them, and if you had to manipulate the population demographics or reproduction a little, keep some people down in order to make sure that others others don't lose the singular culture that they already have, that would be okay, right? Of course, that would just be eugenics, but hey, we're all conservatives here. Sich heil and all that.
it ain't the military... the military is a drop in the bucket compared to what we spend on socialism
First off, the ratio is decidedly un-drop-in-the-bucket-like, more like 2:1, social services vs. military industry/expenditure. Next, realize that social services money isn't being taxed out of the economy, it's going right back into it when it pays for drugs, housing, food, and all the other things that constitute a social safety net. ON THE OTHER HAND, the resources portion of that military money goes out and get blown up and shot down with every pretty missile, smart-bomb, or fast-plane explosion and burned right out the tailpipe (or similar appendages on planes, tanks, jeeps, submarines, aircraft carriers, personnel carriers...) leaving dollars for non-American economies. Still more of it is multiplicative, i.e. spend $millions$ hitting an Iraqi village, and you get the privelege of spending $many more millions$ on medical care and resources to rebuild it, only this time the money doesn't go back into the general blue and white collars of the American economy, it goes to the few fat cats at the top of the multinational economy in specialized industries that can operate overseas.
And if you think we have a socialist political-economic system in the United States, then you have lost every bit as much perspective as people think you arch-conservatives have.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Because the party that cheated won on their first move, and now controls all 3 branches of government. What do you think they're gonna do, decentralize now so everyone can vote them out?
~Rebecca
This is the perfect answer to the "paper voting can be tampered with anyway" point. The current political landscape is a testbed for unfounded moral equivalency. A lie about a blowjob is not the same as a lie about a war, and in the same vein, paper ballot box stuffing is not the same as electronic vote tampering. The latter has far more potential to improperly influence important elections and to undermine the democratic process than its paper counterpart ever did. If you believe at all in the ability of computer technology to make most other tasks simpler and easier, then you have to at least consider the possibility that fixing elections has just become simpler and easier with the advent of the Diebold machines.
that allowing "private, partisan companies to secretly count and tabulate votes using their own proprietary software" is a bad idea? Is anyone really naive enough to believe in the 'honesty' and 'integrity' of corporate America?
What? A large American company Lie? Cheat? Steal? Nooo, not in this day and age!
Maybe all these companies are using the Jedi Mind Trick on the more feeble minded members of our government:
Diebold: "We don't need any official oversight."
Government: "You don't need any official oversight."
Diebold: "We can count the votes in our secret underground lair."
Government: "You can count the votes in your secret underground lair."
Its funny though how people will tend to distrust an administration who blatantly LIED to them about the reason for going to war. What I also still can't believe is not having seen the words "WMD LIE" on the front page of major newspapers. Faulty intelligence ! how can establishment with so much infrastructure, manpower and money (and capabilities) as the US intelligence community be so wrong about something. Makes me sick just thinking about it.
What's sad is you can't say that anywhere without being accused of playing partisan politics. I don't care what side of the electoral fence you're on, but i'm sorry, this administration still owes us an explanation.
And it shouldn't include the words ("better off now", "must stay the course", "he was a bad guy anyway").
A million monkeys and this is the best sig they could come up with...
No, we're all so wrapped up in which club is the most popular that we don't actually really care how the country runs. Most of us are under the mistaken impression that our system can never go really wrong.
Take you, for instance. I bet you've managed to completely ignore the evidence mounting that Rumsfeld has personally authorized torture, that the war in Iraq was justified by supposed facts that the administration was well aware weren't true, that they leaked the name of a CIA agent for political gain, that there was plenty enough evidence lying around to figure out 9/11 was giong to happen and stop it before it did, that the government has been engaged in illegal spying operations on the American people, and a whole host of other injustices. You cover your ears and close your eyes and shout "Na na, I can't hear you!" like a petulant child while out of the other side of your face you invent all kinds of justifications that you think somehow condone behavior that's blatantly illegal. Not to mention the less flashy corporate corruption inherent in giving all the Iraq reconstruction deals to Haliburton.
At least the Democrats had the decency to be quietly embarassed about Bill Clinton's use of his office for personal gain (Tyson chicken (while he was governer), Whitewater and interns) and his lying on the stand. Republicans get in my face and shout "War is Peace!" "Freedom is Slavery!" "Criticism of the government is unpatriotic!" "Adultery is grounds for impeachment!". Lying on the stand is though, IMHO, but none of the Republicans seemed to be upset about that, perhaps because they didn't want to call attention to a behavior they seem to be so in love with themselves.
Not that I'm all that happy with the Democrats either. They want a nanny socialist state where everybody speaks very softly in order to avoid offending anyone. But I'd rather descend into that than the stick-up-your-ass facism the Republicans want, especially since they to a one seem to be in deep denial about it.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Electronic voting isn't prima facie more vulnerable than previous voting methods; rather it's the current crop of voting machines that are poorly engineered that's the problem.
As an electrical engineer, I wholeheartedly disagree with you.
It is fairly simple for someone from each party to stand there an watch ballots get stuffed into a box and to observe the count.
It is much harder to disassemble all the hardware and software inside an electronic voting machine.
One requires a budget in the millions. The other requires a couple people standing around for an evening.
Life is too short to proofread.
A program or machine isn't hacked if it does exactly what it is designed and implemented to do. The these machines have been designed and implemented to cheat. There's no hacking involved.
1. Centralized voting means you only need to corrupt small number of people to corrupt an election.
2. Decentralized voting means you need to corrupt many, many people to substantially change an election result.
3. The US has a history of centralizing its vote counting, using techniques such as moving ballot boxes to central counting locations, and using electronic means to centralize counting.
Given the amount of noise about appearance of fraud in US elections, why isn't vote counting de-centralized? Other democracies seem to manage.
Because the two parties in power have worked long and hard to get it centralized. They don't really care (as a whole) if the system can be corrputed, only that they don't get caught doing it.
The same arguments for decentralization of vote counting apply to decentralizing Congress. There really is no need in today's world for Congress to meet in Washington DC all the time, or even for voting. By leaving the congress critters in their home states you at least have a chance to make them available for *gasp* their consitutents, and you decentralize the lobbying committees. This is also the same reason that so much of today's federal legislation should not exist, and be left to the states.
Oregon passing a bad law has much less impact than the US congress passing a bad law. Florida, for example, mandating the use of Diebold electronic machines has less impact/risk than the US congress doing that, to use a contextual example.
But it won't be changed for the same reason we don't get decentralized vote processing. It benefits those in power (lobyists and congress critters), just like anti-fusion[1] laws, primaries, and the two-party system do.
1: Political fusion is where multiple parties combine to nominate someone to run. For example, the Constitution and Libertarian parties may nominate the same person. Republicans and Democrats both used this to get into power in many states and then make it illegal.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
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