BBV In The Latest Progressive Populist !!! - It'll Make Your Blood Boil !! [View All]

[WillyT]

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"It is still unclear exactly how results from these missing cards were tabulated, or if they were counted at all," Gumbel wrote. "And we will probably never know, for a highly disturbing reason. The vote count was not conducted by state elections officials, but by the private company that sold Georgia the voting machines in the first place, under a strict trade-secrecy contract that made it not only difficult but actually illegal -- on pain of stiff criminal penalties -- for the state to touch the equipment or examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines worked properly. There was not even a paper trail to follow up."

And...

Bev Harris, who has spent a year investigating problems with electronic voting systems and is the author of a book on the technology, told Wired.com the practice of patching systems after they've been certified opens the possibility for anyone -- from Diebold employees to local election officials -- to install malicious code on a machine that could alter election results and then delete itself to avoid detection.

This scenario is particularly worrisome, she said, in light of what happened in the Georgia election. Harris acknowledged no proof exists that anyone rigged the election systems. "We'll never know exactly what happened in Georgia because there's no paper trail to verify the votes." Harris and other voting activists around the country are calling for states and certifying authorities to open the election process and electronic voting systems to public scrutiny to ensure public confidence in elections.

Diebold did not respond to Wired.com's calls for comment, but in an interview with Salon.com, company spokesman Joseph Richardson denied the company applied any patches to the Georgia machines. "We have analyzed that situation and have no indication of that happening at all," he said

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Link to Article: http://www.populist.com/03.20.dispatches.html

From: http://www.populist.com/current.html

Hope this isn't old news.

:bounce::hi::bounce:

On edit: Cause I just found out, wow... bummer...

:(