Flutterby™! : Chimp make Chump of Diebold 2004-09-25 14:23:12.072073+00

Chimp make Chump of Diebold

2004-09-25 14:23:12.072073+00 by meuon 2 comments

The article states that a chimp can bypass the Diebold e-voting system. Scary to me is that they are apparently using a generic MS-os and Access MDB files to store the records. Apparently, you can break out to Windows and run things fairly easily. If there was ever a reason for a simple single purpose computer, that simply logged voter choices to a log file with running CRC/hash/checksum on the file, this would be it. I'll bet getting "unfettered access to the machine" is not that hard. A real system would be very hard (nothing is impossible) to tamper with even with "unfettered access to the machine". I really like: ""We probably have the most secure system in the nation," - Laughing... Sounds like a call to hackers and phreaks. I predict that there will be some blatent and obvious errors introduced into actual elections like 500k voters in a 100k population town.. all voting for "None of the above".

Ya know, those old mechanical voting machines needed to go the way of the dinosaur as did the punch card systems that gave so much trouble in Florida but for the life of me I can't understand what was wrong with that paper ballot that Tennessee used before I moved down here to Georgia and that Georgia used until just last year. It was machine readable, easy to understand and gave a paper audit trail for easy recounts. What was the lure of these touchscreen machines to begin with?

Same problem as ever -- none of the paper-ballot companies contributed millions of dollars to politicians. Diebold did. You don't need vast right-wing conspiracies when you've got simple, old-fashioned corruption.