Hello Diebold, goodbye democracy

This is an excellent piece electronic voting machines. If you give a crap about democracy, then this is required reading.

As for the possibilities of foul play, Dr Mercuri says they
are virtually limitless. "There are literally hundreds of ways to do
this," she says. "There are hundreds of ways to embed a rogue series of
commands into the code and nobody would ever know because the nature of
programming is so complex. The numbers would all tally perfectly."
Tampering with an election could be something as simple as a
"denial-of-service" attack, in which the machines simply stop working
for an extended period, deterring voters faced with the prospect of
long lines. Or it could be done with invasive computer codes known in
the trade by such nicknames as "Trojan horses" or "Easter eggs".
Detecting one of these, Dr Mercuri says, would be almost impossible
unless the investigator knew in advance it was there and how to trigger
it. Computer researcher Theresa Hommel, who is alarmed by touchscreen
systems, has constructed a simulated voting machine in which the same
candidate always wins, no matter what data you put in. She calls her
model the Fraud-o-matic, and it is available online at
www.wheresthepaper.org.
It is not just touchscreens which are at risk from error or malicious
intrusion. Any computer system used to tabulate votes is vulnerable. An
optical scan of ballots in Scurry County, Texas, last November
erroneously declared a landslide victory for the Republican candidate
for county commissioner; a subsequent hand recount showed that the
Democrat had in fact won. In Comal County, Texas, a computerised
optical scan found that three different candidates had won their races
with exactly 18,181 votes. There was no recount or investigation, even
though the coincidence, with those recurring 1s and 8s, looked highly
suspicious. In heavily Democrat Broward County, Florida � which had
switched to touchscreens in the wake of the hanging chad furore �
more than 100,000 votes were found to have gone "missing" on election
day. The votes were reinstated, but the glitch was not adequately
explained. One local official blamed it on a "minor software thing".
Roxanne Jekot, who has put much of her professional and personal life
on hold to work on the issue full time, puts it even more strongly.
"Corporate America is very close to running this country. The only
thing that is stopping them from taking total control are the pesky
voters. That's why there's such a drive to control the vote. What we're
seeing is the corporatisation of the last shred of democracy.

Posted by flow Frazao on November 4, 2003 at 07:53 AM | Permalink