How to steal votes and cover your tracks: why Diebold’s AccuVote-TS Voting Machine is unsafe for democracy.

Assume you were the president of a company that made a lot of money selling the electronic voting machines used by 10% of U.S. voters.  Assume also that a Princeton professor and two young grad students ran their own security analysis of your voting machines and determined the following:

  • The physical lock of your voting machines can be picked in 10 seconds.
  • Your voting machines can then easily be infected with a computer virus, since they are general-purpose computers running specialized election software.
  • It only takes about one minute to infect one of your machines using a single memory card.
  • The virus can easily be spread among numerous voting machines by innocent users updating the software with a memory card.
  • Virus software can easily make all of the diagnostic and double-checking software in your machines illusory and meaningless, therefore dangerous.
  • The infected machine can be made to spit out (electronically or on paper) any faked election result, regardless of the voting conducted on the machines.
  • Your machine, which is already in use in some jurisdictions, thus has serious design flaws.

If you want to see a video showing how incredibly easy it is to infect a Diebold machine, click here.  Warning: Don’t watch this video just before going to bed.  You’ll be too angry and it will keep you up.

Since many states are relying on your machine for the integrity of upcoming elections, you (as president of Diebold) would doubtless write something like this to the three guys at …

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Sen. George Allen and the “M” word

"Macaca," that is.  Salon.com is reporting that Sen. George Allen is denying the claims in a separate Salon article by three of Allen’s former football teammates that Allen used a racial epithet and demonstrated racist behavior during college. Within hours of Allen's denial, though, two additional acquaintances of Allen's had…

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Why Americans think Democrats are weak

Take a look at this Ellis Weiner post on Huffpo. His main point?  He claims that something has been long overlooked, despite its current obviousness: The reason Americans think the Democratic Party is "weak on terror" or "weak on security" is because Democrats don't stand up to Republicans. Could anything…

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Rules for being a (Bush-supporting) Republican

This comprehensive list pretty well captures it for me, at least as a description of those Republicans who still strongly support Bush.  Here's a few of my favorites: You must believe that folks who work for their money should be taxed at a high rate, but those who get their money…

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“We’re losing Afghanistan” writes John Kerry in the Wall Street Journal

This article by John Kerry, published today by the Wall Street Journal, is right on target.  Current U.S policy toward Afhanistan is grossly negligent and dangerous, as we've previously argued at this site.

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