(no subject)

[theweaselking]

Diebold voting machines: With a little preparation, you can change every vote in the machine, from inside the voting booth.

Quoth the makers: This is a feature, not a bug.

Click the first link for a whole lot more details.

Comments

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

"For there to be a problem here, you're basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of software," [a spokesman for Diebold] said. "I don't believe these evil elections people exist."

Says it all, really.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Security through relying on people to not be assholes - didn't that die out sometime in the 1970s, 30 minutes after the first two internet machines came online?

And when your former CEO admits to being one of those assholes who is trying to rig elections....

[unnamed525.livejournal.com]

... and I get called a "conspiracy theorist" when I question the validity of elections in Ohio, which uses Diebold machines.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

You do? By whom? Hell, Rolling Stone went into great length about the ridiculous misuse of power in Ohio.

[unnamed525.livejournal.com]

http://thathatedguy.livejournal.com/306128.html?thread=1205200#t1205200

[toku666.livejournal.com]

Did a post get deleted? Nobody there called you a conspiracy (or any other kind of) theorist.

[unnamed525.livejournal.com]

That's how it read initially to me, but I think I was being paranoid.

[toku666.livejournal.com]

Plenty of people including (unfortunately) the editorial staff of the Columbus Dispatch, have pretty much discounted the Rolling Stone article and its attendant, uh, what's that word where it means stuff is true and actually happened and stuff?

Oh yeah, FACTS.

[ryusen.livejournal.com]

Ah Diebold... sometimes i wonder if Micrsoft bankrolls them to make their own security problems pale in comaprison...

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

so their security is based on the idea that "people are nice and wouldn't do it?"

yeah, that'll work.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

No, their security is based around "If there are flaws to exploit, we can exploit them". Diebold is a company run by Republicans and that supports Republicans, who get their contracts to provide machines from Repubicans, and whose internal documents (written by the now-former CEO) stated that their goal was to help to give Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in the 2004 election.

Other documents showed that they've known about their security flaws for a long, long time, and that they deliberately avoid closing them.

Now that the security flaws are out and well-known, they're insisting that nobody, NOBODY could EVER want to defraud an election, despite the fact that the recordless voting machines made by Republicans, bought by Republicans, maintained by Republicans, and run by Republicans consistently (as in, EVERY TIME, on EVERY MACHINE) showed a 5-10% bias in favour of Republicans over exit polls, and paper ballots showed *no* difference from the exit polls.

In fact, they're OFFENDED at the notion that a party composed of dishonest anti-intellectual theocrats and dishonest self-aggrandizing oligarchs might be dishonest. After all, they've only been caught lying about *absolutely everything* every time they've had any authority in the past *40 years*.

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

Yep that was what I figured.

I was just a little surprised by how desperately hollow their excuse is "no we don't have huge flaws trhat can be exploited to put our party in power - because people are GOOD and HONEST!"


I'm still shocked how so many people gasp when i imply a politician is lying. "But Bush/Cheny/Blair said..." HELLO?! Where have you been? Since when is their word trustworthy?