One week until mid-term elections
Mid-term elections in the United States are a week from today.
In the spirit of Halloween I invite all my family & friends to read How to steal an election by hacking the vote (also conveniently available as a PDF) and ponder on the fact that it would only take one bad apple... (no, not that kind of Apple Rachael! ;-)
Oh, and potentially that one bad apple could be in a whole nother country...
Reminds me of listening to the Doug Wright show on KSL (something I generally avoid doing) prior to the primary elections earlier this year. Doug's guest was either the Lt. Governor or someone from his office who was on talking about the new electronic voting machines that were going to be used for the first time. When asked whether people should be concerned over the security of electronic voting the answer was something along the lines of "well to tamper someone would have to be willing to commit a pretty big felony." It struck me as absolutely one of the dumbest things I'd ever heard anyone say—ever.
If you're too busy to read the Ars Technica article then at least watch this relatively short video please.
—Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, October 31, 2006 at 22:25
I was going to vote with an absentee ballot this year, mostly to protest the use of these machines by the state of Utah. Unfortunately, I didn't make it a priority to get a ballot requested, so I'll be touching-screening.
Utah is using the Diebold TSx model, which appears to feature at least minimal paper-trails that are voter-verifiable at the time of voting, although I don't think they are machine readable.
Elections have certainly been tampered with before, this just gives a nice clean way to go about it. Even with a paper trail that records actual votes, who would go to the trouble of recounting when no tampering is obvious.
Wed, 01 Nov 2006, 16:49