Conspiracy Theorist

[kster]

by Robert C. Koehler
January 24, 2008

SNIP...This is not what I’d like to be writing about. Our nation’s soul is bleeding, its future up for grabs. The candidates jockey for a mandate — our mandate — and they’ll define it as narrowly as possible unless we define it for them. How thoroughly and courageously do we repudiate the Cheney-Bush legacy? How resolutely do we move toward peace and global oneness? That’s what 2008 is all about, right?

Why, then, must I divert my attention from matters such as this and ponder . . . memory cards and molded plastic deflectors? Ah, democracy! We can’t simply leave it to the voting machine vendors any more than we can leave it to the politicians. The O-rings and gusset plates of democracy are poised to fail in every election; every vote does not count. The media and most government officials are still in denial about this, still dazzled by glitzy, electronic voting technology or maybe just trapped in their billion-dollar commitment to it. Besides, when has technology ever gone backwards?

But the call for paper ballots and hand counting — however jarring and quaint it may sound in the 21st century — comes most urgently not from Luddites or flat-Earthers but the technophiles and self-proclaimed geeks who understand computers most intimately, and know their vulnerabilities.

Bruce O’Dell, quoted above, is a security specialist who works with large-scale computer systems in the banking, insurance, bond-trading and related industries, and as a citizen has been one of those people tirelessly sounding the alarm about the dangers of electronic voting, a mission that has included, among much else, addressing legislative subcommittees in Texas and New Hampshire on voting machines.




http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2008/2980

[yourout]

1. I also work in the IT/Industrial electronics world and will never trust our voting to machines.

Way to many ways for a single individual to mess with the millions of votes and likely not get caught.

Try doing that with hand counted paper ballots.
At worst a single individual could flip a few hundred votes in a paper ballot system.

[tbyg52]

2. God, yes.

I don't know of one single person who knows the first thing about computers who trusts those machines. The more you know, the less you trust.

[Sancho]

3. Some of us know better than to simply trust paper!

Welcome to Florida; the land of hanging chads, caging, hacked tabulators, paper tapes tossed in the trash, butterfly ballots, absentee ballots missing, culled registration rolls, election office riots, and Katherine Harris! Florida is the perfect example of a Democratic state with a fraudulent voting process. DRE's are only one part of the serious attack on the voting system down here. Jamming phone lines is child's play for elections down here.

I don't think that ANYTHING except an independent oversight of the process (neutral observers, massive exit polls, guards on the chain-of-ballots) will even come close to fixing the problems. Paper ballots don't give me any more confidence in the election at this point.

We are a third world country.