William Chirolas -- World News Trust
Oct. 25, 2006 -- Today’s reading included an LA Times article by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, titled “New voting systems, rules may spell trouble at polls -- Election analysts expect complications," which listed out the types of problems that could be expected to cause voters to distrust the reported result of an election (perhaps coming soon in 2006 when the GOP keep control of Congress despite being in desperate shape per the pre-election polls) -- “Unproven electronic voting machines, stricter voter identification requirements in many states, new databases and partisan disputes over registration campaigns.”
He noted that we do not yet have quality standards for our voting machines and, most important, we do not yet have a mandatory random audit law that would assure the voters that their vote was not being tossed when it didn’t fit the bias of the voting machine maker or the local vote tabulating staff (this needed audit is just doing a statistically valid random sample of paper ballots verified by voters before they leave the polling place, or by doing a paper trail manual audit to verify the reported totals in a statistically valid random sample of precincts, if there are paper ballots or paper trails in use).
University-based computer scientists, as in the Princeton University video, have shown it is easy to slip a memory card into the electronic vote systems and then, via a virus in the data on the test memory card, change the recorded vote later reported to be the opposite of the correct tally, with the virus then self destructing after restoring all systems and removing all traces of its visit to that voting machine. The only solution is a paper trail with random audits.
However, as easily hacked as our electronic voting machines are, they seem at worst to have been tampered with in the past to decrease the winning party’s margin in districts expected to go heavily for that party. There is no proof this ever happened (although statistical analysis suggests it is it did happen in Florida in 2004) and there are statistical indications that electronic voting machine tampering did not happen on a large scale in 2004, and indeed did not happen in any concentrated way in any given geographic area or in any given type of voting machine in '04. The Florida problem and the Ohio problem in 2004 was more in vote suppression via voter identification and the creation of databases of eligible voters, all in the name of preventing a fraud. No matter that the fraud we are preventing does not appear to be occurring anywhere in the United States –- at least not in anything other than tiny numbers.
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http://www.worldnewstrust.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=451
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