Anyone else worried about the upcoming elections.....

and how the votes are counted?

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/05/13/dented.diebold.ap/
Voting machine business stormy for Diebold (from May 14)
"Diebold's e-voting system was first stung by criticism when a voter rights advocate, Bev Harris, managed to obtain the company's software blueprints, known as source code, on an unprotected Internet site in early 2003. Later that year, an unidentified hacker broke into a Diebold server and stole software, e-mails and other internal documents.

And during the primaries, vote counts in Maryland were delayed because of modem glitches, and machines in much of California's San Diego County malfunctioned, potentially disenfranchising hundreds of voters."

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1084316008117
Count Crisis?
Elections official warns of glitches that may scramble vote auditing
(from MAy 13)

....
"One of the biggest complaints about touch-screen voting systems is that it is impossible to do a true recount of each vote using touch-screen machines unless the electronic machines are specially equipped with a voter-verified paper trail system.

But Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood, who was appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush, has opposed the printers as unnecessary, and the GOP-dominated Legislature resisted Democratic efforts this past session to authorize them. "


http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1160482,00.html
(from March)
Comment
The hacks in the machine

"The electronic voting story may be nothing more than a case of engineering incompetence blended with corporate greed living alongside political expediency. On the other hand, it may be more sinister. "Those who cast the votes decide nothing," said Josef Stalin. "Those who count the votes decide everything."

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.htm
Published on Thursday, August 28, 2003 by the Cleveland Plain Dealer
Voting Machine Controversy
by Julie Carr Smyth

COLUMBUS - The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.



http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/02/09/voting_machines/index.html
(Feb. )
Will the election be hacked?
A Salon special report reveals how new voting machines could result in a rigged presidential race -- and we'd never know
....Roy Barnes, the defeated Democratic governor, says that blaming his loss on voting machines is "ridiculous." And, to be sure, there is no evidence proving malfeasance, and there probably never will be. The only trouble is, the state cannot furnish any definitive evidence to show that the 2002 election was not fraudulent. Proving that the machines didn't malfunction, or that they weren't hacked, is impossible. And since scores of computer scientists say that voting systems are vulnerable to attack, and because activists have raised legitimate concerns about election equipment vendors' politics and processes, Jekot's fears have come to seem, to many, entirely reasonable.
....
"But on Election Day this November, more than 20 percent of American voters will cast their ballots on paperless electronic machines; voters across the nation will encounter them during the primaries. Critics of touch-screen systems point to the controversy surrounding the vote in Georgia as a sign of things to come nationally. If there's an upset in a close presidential race, will we be able to trust it? Ironically, the paperless systems were supposed to restore trust in a democracy that saw the presidency hang by a few thousand chads in Florida three years ago. In Georgia, and increasingly across the nation, they're in danger of doing quite the opposite."



SO, Will everything be properly in place for the November elections? Will we have fair and balanced elections?

 

http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/09/23/bev_harris/
An open invitation to election fraud
(Sept 2003)
"Tell me about the flaw you uncovered in the Diebold system.

Well, we uncovered a few problems in the memos, but the first one that we published specifically supported the flaw that I wrote about in July of 2003. And to my surprise these memos admitted they were aware of the flaw, and it was actually brought to their attention by Ciber labs -- which is a certifier -- in October 2001, and they made a decision not to fix it.

So it was brought to their attention two years ago?

Right.

So what was the flaw?

Specifically the flaw was that you can get at the central vote-counting database through Microsoft Access. They have the security disabled. And when you get in that way, you are able to overwrite the audit log, which is supposed to log the transactions, and this [audit log] is one of the key things they cite as a security measure when they sell the system.

So you can break in and then hide your tracks.

You don't even need to break in. It will open right up and in you go. You can change the votes and you can overwrite the audit trail. It doesn't keep any record of anything in the audit trail when you're in this back door, but let's say you went in the front door and you didn't want to have anything you did there appear anywhere -- you can then go in the backdoor and erase what you did. "
.....
"OK, so we should talk about how Diebold responded to your posting these memos.

As soon ... a few days after we posted them they sent us a cease-and-desist letter -- interestingly authenticating the memos and laying claim to them, telling us that they were copyrighted. So they claimed copyright and they told us to take them off the Web.

Right. By claiming copyright they're saying they own them, so that seems to indicate they are authentic memos.

Exactly. "

I know some of these articles were written months ago, but the issue's importance and the pace at which it is being taken care of (if at all, on a state by state case, whichever way) interests me.....

 

Interesting.....
ok, so i guess people (voters) consider this a non-issue, or have great faith in our election process being error free, or at least not flawed enough for worry..... After all, what could possibly go wrong?