corrente

Use Diebold electronic voting machines. Salon (go on, get the one-day pass) has an interview with Bev Harris by Farhad Manjoo here:

[MANJOO:] It was brought to their attention two years ago?

[HARRIS:] Right.

[MANJOO:] So what was the flaw?

[HARRIS:] Specifically the flaw was that you can get at the central vote-counting database through Microsoft Access. They have the security disabled. And when you get in that way, you are able to overwrite the audit log, which is supposed to log the transactions, and this [audit log] is one of the key things they cite as a security measure when they sell the system.


[MANJOO:] So you can break in and then hide your tracks.

[HARRIS:] You don't even need to break in. It will open right up and in you go. You can change the votes and you can overwrite the audit trail. It doesn't keep any record of anything in the audit trail when you're in this back door, but let's say you went in the front door and you didn't want to have anything you did there appear anywhere -- you can then go in the backdoor and erase what you did.

[MANJOO:] Who would have access to this? Are we talking about elections officials?

[HARRIS:] A couple situations. Obviously anybody who has access to the computer, whether that's the election supervisor, their assistants, the IT people, the janitor -- anybody who has access to the computer can get into it. ,

Lots of good stuff here, including the fact that the CEO of Diebold is a major Republican contributor and has promised to deliver Ohio to them.

Why is it that the Republicans are so sensitive about some secrets (Cheney on energy, anything on 9/11) and so encaring about others (your vote)? Just asking...