"di" <
[email protected]> wrote in message
news:MKfWg.8842$Go3.6670@dukeread05...
....stuff deleted
>> The Diebold problem makes it certain that the 2006 and 2008 election
>> results will not be reliable. Not to mention Republican strategies
>> across the country to make sure that likely Democratic votes aren't cast
>> in the first place.
>
> Don't forget the 1888 election which the Republicans also stole, Grover
> Cleveland (D) won the popular vote but lost the Electoral vote to Benjamin
> Harrison (R), the scoundrels have been stealing elections for years. :<)
Agreed that Democrats aren't exactly blameless on this, either. Note the
Daly political machine of Chicago or the stolen ballot box of Johnson. The
list goes on, and even Kennedy's campaign of 1960 was probably rigged to a
certain degree, though it may not have been necessary. Nixon's and other
republicans are equally guilty of these practices, but never has the voting,
nationwide, been as corrupted as it was in the previous 2 presidential
elections (read articles by Greg Palast and Martin Luther King III for some
examples).
And worse, the Diebold systems are fatally flawed. The political stance of
the CEO and board are clearly reflected in the results; for example; exit
polls, which are historically extremely accurate tools, were taken at booths
here in California, Ohio, Florida, and several other states, and they showed
very different results than the numbers tallied. It is only in the last 2
elections where these machines were used that the exit polls were so
dramatically wrong.
In addition, there are thousands of computer experts who can easily hack the
code (and probably a few hundred malicious teens, as well). Considering a
single programmer stole over 8 Million from Crocker Bank (bought by Wells
Fargo, some years back) sometime between closing on Friday and opening on
Monday, the idea of running all votes through networked computers running
the same software is a questionable practice.
On a personal note, using the available networking tools at a previous job,
I was able to do some pretty dramatic things, such as read sensitive data,
change data on a LAN, or read data going into and out of a network. Yes,
some of these holes have been plugged, but by no means have all of them been
addressed (see the list of Windows security fixes over the past year for a
single, admittedly worst-case, example).
Rick