[privacy] A good summary of the e-voting SNAFU's

["Dude VanWinkle" <dudevanwinkle () gmail com>]

from: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061101-8131.html

As we move toward the November mid-terms, we're beginning to a more
detailed and depressing picture of exactly what we're up against as a
nation in less than a week: two major new reports from independent
research groups detail the myriad security breaches, and procedural
and technical problems in the 2006 Ohio primaries; stories from early
voting in Texas indicate that the paperless DREs in at least two
counties may have a partisan bias; another major new report from the
University of Connecticut details a whole raft of security
vulnerabilities in Diebold's optical scan voting machines; finally,
BlackBoxVoting.org has released "push this, pull here" instructions
for multiple voting on a Sequoia DRE, no hacking skills necessary.

None of this news bodes well for the November mid-terms, which are
less than a week away. In fact, what the reports described below
indicate is that voters will flock to the polls to vote on fragile,
untested alpha systems that, when they break, cannot be fixed by the
on-site poll workers; the votes that are recorded cannot be adequately
verified by a post-election audit, even if a voter-verified paper
"receipt" is printed by each machine and saved by the county; and
individual counties may or may not have the technical capacity to
actually carry out the task of tabulating all of the electronic
results (forget about the paper receipts!) from all of the machines in
a coherent and reliable manner.

In sum, people will show up on November 7th at many precincts across
America, they will select items on a touch-screen, a lucky few of them
will see a paper record of their choices (correctly marked or not)
scroll by under a glass, and they will return home having participated
in a bit of high-tech political theater that may or may not amount to
a bona fide election.
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