Voting machines: Can the crooks steal it again?

[johan helge]

From http://www.infernalpress.com/Columns/election.html:

"In the 2004 presidential election, the full effect of electronic voting will be felt for the first time and {electronic voting will give} the majority of the results.

<..>

electronic systems provide no way for a voter, or election officials, to verify that a cast ballot corresponds to the vote being recorded. <..> Any programmer can write code that displays one thing on a screen, records something else, and prints yet another result. <..> There is no known way to ensure that this is not happening inside of a voting system. Companies such as Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia, which manufacture the machines and provide the code that runs them, simply take a "trust us" approach.

<..>

In Comal County Texas, an uncanny coincidence resulted in three Republican candidates winning by exactly 18,181 votes each. Two other Republican candidates outside Texas also won by exactly 18,181 votes.

<..>

Chuck Hagel first ran for the U.S. Senate in Nebraska in 1996. Electronic voting machines owned by Election Systems & Software (ES&S) reported that he had won both the primaries and the general election in unprecedented victories. His 1996 victory was considered one of the biggest upsets of that election. He was the first Republican to win a Nebraska senatorial campaign in 24 years and won virtually every demographic group, including many largely black communities that had never before voted Republican.

Six years later Hagel ran again against Democrat Charlie Matulka in 2002, and won in a landslide. He was re-elected to his second term with 83% of the vote: the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska. Again, the votes were counted by ES&S, now the largest voting machine company in America. <..> Chuck Hagel was CEO of ES&S (then AIS) until 1995 and he is still a major stockholder of the parent company of ES&S, McCarthy & Company."

Can the crooks steal it again?

[aquart]

1. Put it this way: they are going to try.

[johan helge]

2. What can stop them from succeeding?

[johan helge]

3. Anyone who knows anything about this?