The comic thread "Dubya caught tampering with votes" missed the point: According to the site mentioned in the thread, the Diebold electronic voting system that will be used in many states in November is EXTREMELY easy to tamper with. Read the information here: Black Box Voting

The site, by the way, is run by Bev Harris, an investigative reporter who's been following the electronic voting debacle for a few years. I don't have any way of vouching for her credibility, but it seems that the Attorney General of California and the Alameda County Board of Elections have joined in a whistleblower lawsuit she and a partner filed against Diebold, the manufacturer of the machines.

Here are a couple of salient points from the site:

"By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks."


"As computer security expert Hugh Thompson demonstrated at the Aug. 18 California Secretary of State meeting, you simply open any text editor, like "Notepad," and type a six-line Visual Basic Script, and you own the election.

Some election officials claim that their GEMS central tabulator is not vulnerable to this back door, because they limit access to the GEMS tabulator room and they require a password to turn on the GEMS computer.

However, any county that uses modems to transfer votes may inadvertently be giving control of the entire central tabulator to anyone who gets at the computer through the modem phone lines (even if it is NOT attached to the Internet). This allows Diebold, or any individual, to manipulate votes at their leisure, from any personal computer anywhere in the world."


Check it out. The site also has Harris' book "Black Box Voting" available for free download.

No wonder Bush doesn't give a damn who wins the debates!

Aloha,
Mark