Wednesday, October 22, 2003

Scoop: Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program

Scoop: Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program: "According to election industry officials, electronic voting systems are absolutely secure, because they are protected by passwords and tamperproof audit logs. But the passwords can easily be bypassed, and in fact the audit logs can be altered. Worse, the votes can be changed without anyone knowing, even the County Election Supervisor who runs the election system.

The computer programs that tell electronic voting machines how to record and tally votes are allowed to be held as 'trade secrets.' Can citizen's groups examine them? No. The companies that make these machines insist that their mechanisms are a proprietary secret. Can citizen's groups, or even election officials, audit their accuracy? Not at all, with touch screens, and rarely, with optical scans, because most state laws mandate that optical scan paper ballots be run through the machine and then sealed into a box, never to be counted unless there is a court order. Even in recounts, the ballots are just run through the machine again. Nowadays, all we look at is the machine tally. "

Been reading on this for a bit. Crazy stuff. Paper ballots, got to be the way to go.

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