Electronic Voting: Hacked?

Okay, I'll just be forthright and say that electronic voting scares the bajeezus out of me. I don't like it. I've been very cynical about electronic voting machines for a while, and the fact that many of them don't even leave paper trails scares me even more. I recently found an article that not only sums up my feelings quite well, but also investigates certain happenings around the installation of these voting machines.

Quote:

Taken from rollingstone.com

The debacle of the 2000 presidential election made it all too apparent to most Americans that our electoral system is broken. And private-sector entrepreneurs were quick to offer a fix: Touch-screen voting machines, promised the industry and its lobbyists, would make voting as easy and reliable as withdrawing cash from an ATM. Congress, always ready with funds for needy industries, swiftly authorized $3.9 billion to upgrade the nation's election systems - with much of the money devoted to installing electronic voting machines in each of America's 180,000 precincts. But as midterm elections approach this November, electronic voting machines are making things worse instead of better. Studies have demonstrated that hackers can easily rig the technology to fix an election - and across the country this year, faulty equipment and lax security have repeatedly undermined election primaries. In Tarrant County, Texas, electronic machines counted some ballots as many as six times, recording 100,000 more votes than were actually cast. In San Diego, poll workers took machines home for unsupervised "sleepovers" before the vote, leaving the equipment vulnerable to tampering. And in Ohio - where, as I recently reported in "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" [RS 1002], dirty tricks may have cost John Kerry the presidency - a government report uncovered large and unexplained discrepancies in vote totals recorded by machines in Cuyahoga County.

Even worse, many electronic machines don't produce a paper record that can be recounted when equipment malfunctions - an omission that practically invites malicious tampering. "Every board of election has staff members with the technological ability to fix an election," Ion Sancho, an election supervisor in Leon County, Florida, told me. "Even one corrupt staffer can throw an election. Without paper records, it could happen under my nose and there is no way I'd ever find out about it. With a few key people in the right places, it would be possible to throw a presidential election."

Read the whole article here.

I'm usually not one to be so paranoid on a political matter, but I feel this one is very overlooked and potentially very dangerous. It only takes ONE electronic voting machine in a district to throw off the entire vote. What are your thoughts on this? Am I crazy? Do you partially or fully agree? How can this be stopped? Discuss.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Ooh, Broken Government on CNN is going to cover electronic vote hacking in just a few minutes. I'll edit this post with my thoughts after that.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Yes, fraud to some degree has always existed in past elections. However, why this issue seems so important to me has to do with a few things. One, this can be fixed. Maybe not easily, but certainly much easier than trying to find ways to prevent other instances of election fraud. Secondly, this is on such a national scale that I feel it has to be dealt with. Electronic voting machines are virtually everywhere now. Almost every district has at least one. Finally, every other election/voting problem I've ever heard of in my lifetime has never received as much attention or alarm as this one has. It's on a large scale, it potentially affects a lot of people, and it can be stopped in a relatively simple way; that is, to stop using them altogether. Quebec already has, and many governors and mayors around the US have expressed their desire to go back to paper ballots.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.