Berlusconi faces inquiry into claims he tried to rig election

[cal04]

Prosecutors in Rome have launched an investigation into claims that Silvio Berlusconi tried to electronically rig Italy's April general election. The claims are contained in an investigative report released today in video form with a weekly political review, Il Diario.

The election marked the first time that electronic voting machines were used in Italy, not to do the initial counting but to collate results arrived at by manual counting at the different polling stations.

The vote was extraordinarily close, and it was not until late in the morning of the day after the election that the centre-left announced that it had secured enough seats in both houses to form a government. Mr Berlusconi refused to recognise the victory, and claimed that the election had been stolen by the opposition's skulduggery.

(snip)
The thesis of the film is that, thanks to software surreptitiously installed in the central computers, spoiled ballots were transferred to Berlusconi's party, Forza Italia. But Interior Minister Beppe Pisanu, a trusted former Christian Democrat, learned of the attempted fraud and vetoed it.

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2010009.ece
Film accusing Italy's Berlusconi of vote-rigging prompts probe
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061123/ennew_afp/afpentertainmentitaly_061123202526

[sweetheart]

1. snicker snicker, snort, gufaww...

.. ha ha :rofl: too long in the coming....

Hang him by his toes, make him work at macdonalds!

Tickle him with feathers until his sides ache. :-)

[Phredicles]

2. Are there any exit polling data?

Given that Berlusconi is kind of an Italian Rupert Murdoch who backed an extremely unpopular war, I was a little surprised the election was so close.

[cal04]

3. a little more information here

Deaglio, editor of the left-wing Diario weekly, and Cremagnani, a television journalist, point to an improbably steep drop in the number of blank ballots to 445,500 this year from 1.69 million in 2001, when turnout was somewhat lower.

Every election in the past 60 years has seen around 1.5 million blank votes, they note.

Deaglio and Cremagnani assert that a small computer program allowed the interior ministry to change some of the blank ballots to votes for Berlusconi's center-right coalition.

This, they say, explains why exit polls gave Prodi a comfortable margin of victory -- 50 to 54 percent of the vote against 45-49 percent for Berlusconi -- and why this lead closed continually through the night, dwindling to a knife-edge victory of just 24,000 votes.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061123/ennew_afp/afpentertainmentitaly_061123202526

[Wilms]

4. "not to do the initial counting but to collate results arrived at by manual counting"

So, one moral of the story is that not just e-voting, but e-tallying can be rigged.