Reply #43: The Central Office... [View All]

[KharmaTrain]

Waaaaay back in the 80's, I put on my leisure suit and had the chance to watch the first run through of a new fangled computerized system here in Cook County. It was very similar to how the Diebold system works now...but the memory chip was the size of a brick and had to be driven to a central location and then "modemed" into the main center. The big concern then was how that data was treated as there was little oversight into that system and would be easier to hack one machine than 100 separate ones. It was easier to fudge votes when you're dealing with hundreds or thousands than on the precinct level where it can be noticed and more easily traced.

I remember reading about the stacking case on TPM...and that sounded like a "central office" problem being it was a recount than an actual tampering of machines in the precincts or during the actual election. The fact that people were aware of ways of rigging the system has made pulling this type of stuff more difficult. I'm still looking for someone who was arrested for replacing a memory stick or hacking into a machine to manipulate the results.