Comments: Electronic Voting Easy to Rig

[dpbrown]

Comments: Electronic Voting Easy to Rig


Wednesday, October 15, 2003
By Applelinks Senior Editor John H. Farr


This is one of those stories that is very difficult for most people, not to mention quick-and-dirty Web site writers, to get a handle on. But we consider it to be of the utmost importance and feel the time is ripe for speaking out on the issue. Here's just one fact for starters: the software used by the Diebold touch-screen electronic voting machines rapidly being installed in many states has specifically been designed to be compatible with WinCE 3.0, making it at least theoretically possible to manipulate the program from a remote location using a PDA.

This article by Andrew Gumbel for the British newspaper site The Independent is as good a place to start as any, and we guarantee that reading the full story will leave you more than a little upset. Given the shoddy inspections and lack of official certifications of many of the machines used in the last presidential election in Georgia, for example, the voting may have been illegal. In fact, there are enough juicy bits in the Georgia tale alone to make conspiracy theorists out of the most mild-mannered citizens. Take the WinCE 3.0 compatibility, for example: emails have been discovered betweeen Diebold company executives and others indicating an attempt to conceal this fact from independent inspectors. They didn't want anyone to know, obviously. Considering that someone could literally cruise by a polling place, execute a few commands on a handheld computer, and change the results recorded on the voting machines, we're surprised.

Even if you have enough faith to doubt that anyone would ever be so unscrupulous, you have to admit that basing any kind of vote-recording software on any kind of Windows system is asking for trouble in the first place. But here's the Big One: wih electronic voting, there are no hard copy ballots to go back to if anyone raises a fuss. Recounts are impossible! Let's run that by again: with electronic voting, there can be no recounts. If fraud was committed, there's no way to prove it.

This isn't right, folks. It just isn't right.

http://www.applelinks.com/articles/2003/10/20031015173854.shtml

[CJIowa]

1. Thanks

Thank you for posting this link. I shared the British article with a repub/computer expert friend. He had the look of a cat with a bird in his mouth, yet denied that it was a real concern as obviously our investigative press in the US has said nothing. I could tell that the British article set forth real concerns that he wanted to pretend did not exist. This editorial will give me reason to go back to him to show that there is a US computer genius who is also concerned and wants questions answered.

[dpbrown]

2. Excellent, I'm glad this will help you with your argument

The "no recount" scenario is so real, and so deadly to democracy, that I hope people finally come right out into the streets to do something about this.

[bemildred]

3. Vote rigging is as american as apple pie.

We practically invented it. Any such system needs to be
bulletproof, or it will be gamed.

[Fovea]

4. In the first half of the 20th C.

Kansas City had the most civic minded dead people in the history of death. There was hardly a new road of building tax voted down, if it was made with Pendergast Concrete.

This sounds weirdly familiar, the only difference is that Kansas Citians got the improved roads, not Iraqis.

[HPLeft]

5. Here's another piece I've just come across

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=452972