Voting Machines - Gone in 240 Secs

The punch card system we used here in Kern County worked just fine. The ballots were easy to handle, the punch machines worked and it was all easy to understand. If you didn't well I for one hope you weren't voting anyway. Now we have this electronic BS thanks to a bunch of retards in Florida (we also got GWB).

Now one would tend to think that since I've worked with computers for over 20 years I would be in favor of electronic voting. No, in fact because I do I'm all the more suspecious of it.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060913-7735.html

A group of Princeton computer scientists has published a study that examines flaws and vulnerabilities in Diebold's AccuVote-TS voting machines. Complete with a video that demonstrates the ease with which the electronic voting machine can be compromised, the study provides chilling insight into the serious risk of election tampering and fraud created by modern voting technology. The vote-stealing demonstration software developed by the computer scientists "can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss."

The study reveals that "[m]alicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection," and that the software can be installed on a voting machine in only a minute by anyone that has physical access. The study also discovered that Diebold's AccuVote-TS systems can be targeted by self-propagating viruses "that can spread malicious software automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre- and post-election activity." The computer scientists conclude that defects are present in the hardware of the AccuVote-TS as well as the software. Although some issues can be mitigated by software updates, the machines themselves will have to be replaced in order to eliminate some of the problems identified by the study.