respond to: letters@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-fraud29nov29,1,5244316.story?coll=la-news-comment-editorialsStep Toward Election Standards
November 29, 2004
The Internet conspiracy theories that George W. Bush supporters stole the election by tampering with electronic voting equipment have finally died down, and for good reason. The new machines generally worked well, and there's no evidence that their data were corrupted in ways that could have swung the election.
That doesn't mean, though, that the nation's precincts should continue moving to the latest and most costly e-voting systems. The conventional wisdom now emerging — that the lack of evidence that e-voting systems improperly influenced the election means that fraud would have been impossible — is just as loopy as the cloak-and-dagger conspiracy theories it is replacing.
Touch-screen systems, which recorded about 30% of the nation's votes Nov. 2 (up from 12% four years ago), suffer from a host of security flaws that their manufacturers and local election officials have done little to correct. It doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to recognize the possibility of someone using a home computer, a modem and some hacker savvy to break into most of the touch-screen devices now on the market. The most obvious deterrent to such fraud is one that only Nevada managed to implement Nov. 2: a paper printout that scrolls under glass at the edge of the screen.
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Last week, the Government Accountability Office took the first step toward establishing such standards. At Democrats' request, the GAO agreed to study how well both touch-screen and optical scan systems fared in the last election.
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