I've always been a bit suspicoius of the electronic voting methods. With no paper trail, the electronic system is vulerable to hacking. In controlled tests, the machines have been easily hacking and results changed.
""As the Leon County supervisor of elections, Ion Sancho's job is to make sure voting is free of fraud. But the most brazen effort lately to manipulate election results in this Florida locality was carried out by Sancho himself.Four times over the past year Sancho told computer specialists to break in to his voting system. And on all four occasions they did, changing results with what the specialists described as relatively unsophisticated hacking techniques.""
I'm no technophobe, spending much of my spare time online, but if the election process could be this easily disrupted by hackers, it would bring all elections into question, possibly bringing about a crisis in our democratic process. And for what? To pacify simpletons to can't figure out a paper ballot. Oooops! Don't look now Ethyl, I voted for Pat Bucanon!
""Sancho's most recent demonstration was last month. Harri Hursti, a computer security expert from Finland, manipulated the "memory card" that records the votes of ballots run through an optical scanning machine.""
The key word here is Finland. Foriegn countries shouldn't be involved to in our elections in any way, shape, or form. That brings me to this story.
U.S. Investigates Voting Machines’ Venezuela Ties
The key word here is...you guessed it, Venezuela!
The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist Venezuelan government of President (they mean communist dictator) Hugo Chavez
Fhew! This one smells like sulfur!
""The inquiry is focusing on the Venezuelan owners of the software company, the Smartmatic Corporation, and is trying to determine whether the government in Caracas has any control or influence over the firm’s operations, government officials and others familiar with the investigation said.""
I say we draw up legislation now to outlaw any foriegn company from US voting machines. Where's the common sense? How easy would it be for these foriegn companies to alter elections in such a way as to cause riots or increase voter apathy?
""The inquiry on the eve of the midterm elections is being conducted by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or Cfius, the same panel of 12 government agencies that reviewed the abortive attempt by a company in Dubai to take over operations at six American ports earlier this year.""
I detect a pattern. Outsourcing jobs, outsourcing security, outsourcing elections...it's a small world after all.
The concerns about possible ties between the owners of Smartmatic and the Chávez government have been well known to United States foreign-policy officials since before the 2004 recall election in which Mr. Chávez, a strong ally of President Fidel Castro of Cuba, won by an official margin of nearly 20 percent.
Opposition leaders asserted that the balloting had been rigged. But a statistical analysis of the distribution of the vote by American experts in electronic voting security showed that the result did not fit the pattern of irregularities that the opposition had claimed.
At the same time, the official audit of the vote by the Venezuelan election authorities was badly flawed, one of the American experts said. “They did it all wrong,” one of the authors of the study, Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, said in an interview.
Commies rigging elections? I never! Next they're going to tell me there's link between Islam and terrorism.
The Onion mocks an easy target.
