Not saying there's any evidence that the election
was cooked, but technology is definitely providing new and better opportunities for vote-rigging.
Quotes are from these two websites:
hxxp://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/03/02/15_vote.html
hxxp://www.blackboxvoting.com/
Worth a look!
All of the people reading this use computers. Most of the people reading this depend upon an operating system which crashes so regularly that they wonder if that weren't the intention of the operating system. Most people, thinking about their experiences with computers would think that the total computerization of voting would be just another way of frustrating their lives.
And, they would not be far wrong. There are roughly thirteen purveyors of electronic voting equipment in this country today, but only two dominate the industry, ES&S and Diebold. Both of these companies have much in common. They refuse to supply source code for their vote-counting software, claiming it to be proprietary (source code is the original line-by-line programming of the system). Both have had repeated failures of their equipment on election day. The equipment of both companies has been implicated in vote-switching in contested elections. Both have sought to introduce voting machines which do not provide a paper trail for individual votes.
Recently, technicians and programmers for Diebold Election Systems, the company that supplied every single voting machine for the surprising 2002 results in the state of Georgia, the company that is preparing to convert the state of Maryland to its no-paper-trail computerized voting, admitted to a file-sharing system that amounts to a colossal security flaw.
[...] Diebold Election Systems, which builds the AccuVote machines, both optical scan and touch-screen, has been parking files on an unprotected public Internet location. Thousands of files were available: election files, hardware and software specifications, program files, voting program patches.
The files on the Diebold FTP server are sensitive. If you want to tamper with election results, you either want to change the program or change the data file. That is why the program files, which control how the votes are tabulated, and the data files, which contain the actual vote count, should not be available for swapping back and forth like recipes on a cookbook site.
[...] The FTP button gave total access to anonymous users, allowing anyone to download and apparently, upload to the server. The FTP site contained no copyright statement, asked for no user name, put locks on no directories. Visitors from anywhere in the world could simply walk in the front door.
In early February, 2003, programmers for Diebold Election Systems admitted that they had been parking highly sensitive company files on an unprotected web site, a serious security mistake by anyone's reckoning. The very next week officials from the state of Georgia admitted that a program "patch" was administered to over 22,000 unauditable touch-screen voting machines in Georgia. This took place shortly before the November 2002 election. [...] Putting patches on 22,000 voting machines without looking at the underlying code has put the Georgia election results in doubt, for two reasons:
First, when a patch is administered, whatever the explanation, it can make other, unnoticed changes to the way the program operates. In this case, no one bothered to see what the patch did. Instead, certification officials just took the vendor's word for it. At least 20 different people were driving around the state with memory cards that installed the patch, and the security surrounding creating these cards, or substituting cards, did not seem to be a high priority. When Election Day arrived, no one knew for sure whether the vote-counting program had been altered. Especially after the patch was installed, they had no way to find out if rogue programs were being run in the background.
Second, ignoring the possibility of an attack on the voting system through the operating system is completely naive. In fact, in testimony before Congress Douglas W. Jones identified the very real risk of an attack on voting machines through the Windows operating system, specifically with the type of machines (Diebold / Global Election Systems DRE machines) that were used in Georgia!
ES&S is currently embroiled in other controversy, including the fact that one of its investors and former executives, Charles Hagel, U.S. Senator for Nebraska, has failed to fully disclose his relationship to the company on his FEC disclosure forms for several years, and that ES&S machines counted votes in fully two-thirds of Nebraska precincts in elections in which Hagel was a contender. More problematic is the issue of his Democratic opponent in those elections being unable to contest election results due to a Nebraska state law which prevents election officials from examining and counting the paper ballots generated during the election, and making a recount the sole province of the companies supplying the very electronic voting machines responsible for purported counting errors.
[...] All of this intrigue has nothing legal to do with current election law, because, stupidly, election managers and state legislators around the country have made such companies as ES&S and Diebold the sine qua non of election probity by effectively eliminating the paper trail which could verify any election, either by authorizing electronic voting machines which cannot provide a paper trail, or by, in the case of Nebraska law, making the examination of paper ballots illegal.
Linear Mode
