Sunday, October 31, 2004
Serious flaws found in Diebold machines
This might help choose our President!
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This might help choose our President!
Last month, U.S. Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski decided to try one of Maryland's new voting machines in Takoma Park. It was a brand-new Diebold AccuVote-TS. The state of Maryland has just spent $55 million for the ATM-like electronic voting devices to be used in the upcoming presidential election.
The AccuVote, acting just as a demonstration, offered two choices: "yes" and "no." Sen. Mikulski pressed "no." The machine registered "yes."
The cackling sound you heard was Avi Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins. But, as Dr. Rubin will openly confess, it really wasn't funny.
One-third of voters in the November election will be using electronic voting machines, simple-minded computers that record and report votes. Dr. Rubin and many computer scientists see nothing less than a threat to American democracy in these machines. They are easy to tamper with, he believes, and that makes it possible to rig elections. Indeed, there already are conspiracy theories flying around the Internet of a conservative plot to steal the presidential election. (A number of Conservative groups are equally unhappy about the instruments.) In many cases they are set up to prevent recounts in case of disputes.
Plots to the contrary, after what happened in Florida in 2000 — and what is happening in Florida now — attention must be paid.
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