E-Voting Machine an Easy Hack

Here is another man's experiences with the electronic voting machines, this time in Maryland's primary.

 

But we can trust the government, can't we?

 

My goodness, this is a thing!

First paper ballets are not good enough and now we can't trust electronic voting. It goes back to something I have believed for several years now. If you lose an election in modern America (2000 forward) you can always blame it on the voting machines (etc) and claim your supporters vote's were not counted. In other words you don't have to admit defeat no matter how bad you lose. You can even have individuals, who claim they voted for you, go on tv and talk about how their vote was not counted. Of course that begs the question, "how do they know there vote was not counted"? Nobody in the media bothers to ask that simple question because asking it would refute the claim.

Look, people can always cheat. With both paper or electronic ballets there is a chance someone will cheat. There is nothing that can be done about that. If we can launch a space shuttle and put it in orbit I think we can figure out a way to do electronic voting with a reasonable level of security and assurance. However those who don't want to admit defeat have learned that the best way to avoid admitting defeat is to blame their defeat on the evil voting methods.

 

Actually, the simple question was asked, but the answer was, "You can not know for sure."

One of the red flags was exit polling vs election results. In precincts with mechanical voting machines, exit polling matched the election results fairly closely, but in certain precincts with e-voting machines the exit polls weren't even close. Nothing was proven because there was no way to without an audit trail.

The point is that decent security could be built into the e-voting machines and simply wasn't. What's worse, the security measures that were put in place were often disregarded in practice and were demonstrably flimsy.

Sure, people will cheat, but why make it easy and undetectable?

 

The fact is, cheating with defective voting machines like this will be far easier than faking paper ballots.

 

==Certainly there should be a way to verify the vote counts. However politicians have learned that they don't have to lose elections Today, if they don't win, they can claim that the election was stolen. Mark my word in '08, no matter who wins, the other side will claim that the election was stolen. This is the new way to lose, yet not lose. Blame the voting methods.

As for exit polling it is not an exact science.

 

Must have been a coincidence, um? How interesting that exit polls disagreed with the results only in precincts where voting fraud become impossible to detect.

You may want to consider the possibility that in many of these states, democrats might one day have control of these machines.

Do you suppose they'll be more honest than the republicans?

 

Maybe we should go back to paper ballots.

Another idea would be to have people sign their ballots. I don't particularly like that one.

 

There's no system that can't be compromised. But it can be a lot better than what we have. The electonic machines look like they were made to be hacked.

The key is to make hacking them sufficiently dangerous and difficult to discourage the sort of things that went on in the last election.