Reply #42: we don't know who wins elections in the U.S. [View All]

[Zan_of_Texas]

Go be offended by something really offensive, like the fact that 3000 people die of hunger in the US every year. That is something to be truly pissed off about. We're spending $400 or $500 billion to beat up people in the Middle East, but we can't feed people who live here, and who are dying at the rate of one Sept. 11 attack EACH YEAR.

As for elections, read two things and then come back and whine.

1. http://makethemaccountable.com/podvin/media/040201_TheScream.htm
The Scream
2/1/04
By David Podvin
On December 1, 2003, Howard Dean was ahead by twenty points in the polls when he appeared on Hardball with Chris Matthews and said, “We're going to break up the giant media enterprises.” This pronouncement went far beyond the governor’s previous public musings about possibly re-regulating the communications industry, and amounted to a declaration of war on the corporations that administer the flow of information in the United States.
It was an extraordinarily noble and dangerous thing to do: when he advocated a truly free press, Dr. Dean was provoking the corrupt media conglomerates that control what most Americans see and hear and read, and thereby control what most Americans think.
The media giants quickly responded <more>

2. Diebold is one of the four largest voting machine companies in the U.S. They make not only the new electronic paperless machines, but also optical scanners. A big portion of votes in the US are cast on either electronic machines or optical scanners. Diebold scanners were in use in NH, for instance. The scanners use computers to count. Computers do what they're told by programmers. The margin of victory, Kerry over Dean, in Iowa and NH was roughly 25,000 voters in each state. In NH, Dean AND Kerry got more actual votes than George W. Bush got in his Republican primary there. Yet Dean was dubbed "not electable."

Read the latest study of Diebold equipment by RABA:

Security Poor in Electronic Voting Machines, Study Warns

By JOHN SCHWARTZ
NEW YORK TIMES
January 29, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/29/technology/29CND-SECU.html

Slightly different and shorter version dated Jan. 30: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0130-03.htm

Electronic voting machines made by Diebold Inc. that are widely used in several states have such poor computer security and physical security that an election could be disrupted or even stolen by corrupt insiders or determined outsiders, according to a new report presented today to Maryland state legislators. Authors of the report - the first hands-on attempt to hack Diebold voting machine systems under conditions found during an election - were careful to say that the machines, if not hacked, count votes correctly, and that issues discovered in the "red team" exercise could be addressed in a preliminary way in time for the state's primaries in March. <yeah, and a bank that leaves its cash in the middle of the street, if not robbed, will have the exactly correct amount of cash at the end of the day too.>

<snip>

William A. Arbaugh, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Maryland and a member of the Red Team exercise, said, "I can say with confidence that nobody looked at the system with an eye to security who understands security." In the security exercise, members of the attack team said they were surprised to find that the touch-screen machines used by voters all used the same physical key to the two locks that protect their innards from tampering. With hand-held computers and a little sleight of hand, they found, the touch screens could be reprogrammed to make a vote for one candidate count for an opponent, or results could be fouled so that a precinct's tally could not be used.

In addition, they said, communications between the terminals and the larger server computers that tally results from many precincts do not require that machines on either end of the line prove that they are legitimate, an omission that could allow someone to grab information that could be used to falsify whole precincts worth of votes.

<snip>

There is much more to be done, Mr. Arbaugh said. Working on the exercise for just a week to prepare for the one-day attack, he said, "we got the tip of the iceberg." He added, "It seemed everywhere we scratched, there was something that's pretty troubling."

<snip>