11.07.2004

optical-scan

Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked (from: everyone and their Michael Moore (and Jim.))

So the headline is sensational, and Michael Moore is always Michael Moore. But this is about more than the lunatic fringe. I don't think any turn of the cards at this point could change the fact that John Kerry didn't get into office. I'd like to dispense with that, at least for the purposes of this particular crusade. I'm sure there are more knowledgeable persons than me that can rattle off a lot of what-ifs about this, what'd happen if somehow it turned out that Bush or the Republicans or some part of their lunatic fringe had rigged this election somewhere.

The headline of that article, to me, should read A Ten Year Old Could Have Changed the Outcome Of The Vote. The scary part about what's being detailed in this article is that the computers that tabulate votes from the optical scan machines used in a lot of counties in Florida are easily-hacked Windows PCs.

Of course the article is pointing to something that happened before the election, when Bev Harris from blackboxvoting.org illustrated on national TV how easily vote results in these PCs can be manipulated. So conceivably the security (both physical and software) on the actual PCs used is such that this sort of tampering isn't as easy as it's being made to sound. The fact that I've so far been unable to find any articles that indicate one way or the other how Florida's counties which used this technology responded is unsettling. If anyone knows of any such articles I'd love to know about them.

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