Our Hackable Democracy

[helderheid]

Andy Greenberg, 10.10.08, 6:00 AM ET


Want to be sure that your vote won't be miscounted, redirected or sabotaged in November's election? If you live in http://get.lingospot.com/link/?@li2=2473&key=WUAPWOZV&ps_id=VeMwfsmUMu&q=QQ:lqOTqjptCQAINew Jersey, Dick Kemmerer suggests you might want to deliver your vote to the county clerk--written on a paper absentee ballot--by hand.[br />
"If I lived in New Jersey and had to choose between a voting machine and walking in a paper ballot," he says, "I'd take paper."

Kemmerer, a professor of computer science at the University of California Santa Barbara, knows too much about New Jersey's alternative: the embattled Sequoia touchscreen voting systems used throughout the state. Last year, he participated in California's "Top-to-Bottom" review of voting machines that found critical security vulnerabilities in the technologies of electronic voting companies Sequoia, Premier Election Solutions and Hart InterCivic--vulnerabilities that the researchers said could be used to prevent machines from accepting votes, change voting counts and, in some cases, even identify voters.

But despite being criticized in at least four distinct studies over the last six years and decertified in California and Ohio, the allegedly faulty machines haven't gone away. When America goes to the polls in November, every voter in New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, South Carolina, Georgia and Louisiana will use the same direct response electronic (DRE) voting machines that lack any paper backup and have been shown again and again to suffer from security flaws, according to polling place data gathered by the non-profit VerifiedVoting.org. Several counties in Florida, a major swing state, also use DREs exclusively without any paper record. And in Pennsylvania, possibly the key state in this year's landmark election, 51 of the state's 67 counties still use paperless DREs.
http://www.forbes.com/2008/10/09/hacking-electronic-voting-tech-security_cx_ag_1010hack_slide_2.html?thisspeed=25000">In Pictures: The Sorry History Of Vote Hacking

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http://www.forbes.com/technology/personaltech/2008/10/09/hacking-electronic-voting-tech-security_cx_ag_1010hack.html