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.)

Comments

As soon as you have people willing to cheat..

[QuantumG]

the process is over. It doesn't matter who votes for who, it only matters who counts the votes.

Re:As soon as you have people willing to cheat..

[plalonde2]

Why are Americans such complete and utter *morons* about vote counting? Why do they insist on centralizing vote-counting, one of the most *scalable* problems in civic governance? Instead, form a multi-partisan committee of volunteers fore *each* ballot box. Split up your voting population to keep each box to under 1000 votes or so. Do the count immediately at the close of polling, at the polling place, with the committee and as many observers as signed up in advance (if your party can't muster a volunteer per ballot box, you're not a serious contender in that district).
If you do it the decentralized way you have to corrupt *a lot* of committees to sway the vote substantially. If you centralize the vote counting (moving ballot boxes, electronic voting, etc) you reduce the number of people you have to coopt dramatically. Clearly, anyone intending to corrupt a vote will prefer centralized alternatives. Anyone trying to demonstrate a fair and just election must prefer the decentralized, hard-to-corrupt model.