Thursday, September 29, 2011
Electronic Voting Machines Easy To Manipulate
An assessment team at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois tested a commonly-used electronic voting machine made by Diebold to demonstrate just how cheaply and eas it is to place alien technology not easily detected into the electronic voting machine to manipulate the votes being tabulated by the machine. The assessment team used Diebold equipment for their testing but noted other electronic voting equipment manufactured by other vendors could just as easily be manipulated using man-in-the-middle hacking techniques. The video above describes how the machines can be manipulated. The New York Times has a story here, highlighting the fact that nearly one-third of all votes cast in this country are cast on these type of electronic voting machines, including many counties in Indiana.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
This is why there should always be a paper trail of some sort.
A few years ago HBO aired a documentary on this subject. It was very compelling.
The software testing done by our County Election Board does not protect against date-specific count rigging - even on the non-touch screen unit that most voters use.
The paper trail is great, but the testing needs to be modified.
As for the touch screens - little wonder Ed Treacy used these exclusively for the Democratic Party slating convention. Irregularities were noted at the time by a number of voters.
Pat, I don't know if you attended the slating for the special congressional district to replace Julia Carson, but there was strong suspicion of tampering at that election. They used the touch screens. Despite the long lines, the party inexplicably took down two of the voting machines before all had voted and took them in back so the vote counting could begin. When the vote totals were announced, Dan Parker announced that Carson had won on the first ballot with about a couple of votes to spare. His supporters began cheering and you couldn't even hear the actual votes announced. You had to inquire after the fact to learn what the supposed vote totals were. Oddly, two of those voting machines were reported stolen in broad daylight in the early afternoon in the parking lot of Binkley's up in Broad Ripple. There was no doubt in my mind that the vote was rigged, and the machines that had been tampered with to ensure Carson's victory were the ones stolen.
When Marion County purchased the touch screen voting machines, they were purchased solely to accommodate people with disabilities. In my precinct, there are typically only two or three votes cast on the touch screen machine; the rest fill out the paper ballots that are scanned-in, thus creating a paper trail. I've wondered why in some precincts the overwhelming number of votes cast are done on the touch screens. Someone has to be pushing people to vote on those because most people want nothing to do with them if they are given the choice.
No wonder Ed Treacey and Beth White love the machines so much! It should have been obvious.
Post a Comment