Thursday, September 14, 2006

Diebold - Part 2


You already know that I cancelled my pledge to the Democratic Party. The trigger for that decision was the Democrats' failure to filibuster the nomination of Alito to the Supreme Court. But the reason I continue to refuse to donate is Diebold - the computerized voting machines developed by admitted partisan Republicans. There's no point in supporting a Democrat's campaign when it's Republicans counting the votes.

Take a look at this excerpt from an article entitled "Princeton prof hacks e-vote machine":

TRENTON, N.J. - A Princeton University computer science professor added new fuel Wednesday to claims that electronic voting machines used across much of the country are vulnerable to hacking that could alter vote totals or disable machines.

In a paper posted on the university's Web site, Edward Felten and two graduate students described how they had tested a Diebold AccuVote-TS machine they obtained, found ways to quickly upload malicious programs and even developed a computer virus able to spread such programs between machines.
...
The researchers say they designed software capable of modifying all records, audit logs and counters kept by the voting machine, ensuring that a careful forensic examination would find nothing wrong.

The programs were able to modify vote totals or cause machines to break down, something that could alter the course of an election if machines were located in crucial polling stations.

It was also possible to design a computer virus to spread malicious programs to multiple machines by piggybacking on a new software download or an election information file being transferred from machine to machine, Felten said.


I'm afraid I'm very pessimistic about this whole picture. The article says that 80 percent of American voters are expected to use some kind of electronic voting machines in the upcoming election.

UPDATE: Here's a video made at Princeton University that illustrates the problem described above. If it doesn't make you sick, you just don't get it.



And now look at this. It's only 35 seconds. It'll give you chills:



The 2004 election was stolen. No doubt about it.

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