Election fraud risks attract wide notice

BLACK-BOX VOTING MACHINES have gotten mainstream press coverage for the first time, following an earlier INQUIRER story here.

Dan Gillmor, the Electronic Frontier Foundation award winning technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, devoted his column last Sunday to the topic, and concluded that voting machines ought to have paper trails, if we are to trust them.

And yesterday, MSNBC ran this story, "E-voting flaws risk ballot fraud". That article describes the study of a group of computer security researchers at Johns Hopkins University, whose findings describe a variety of ways in which Diebold Election Systems machines and software are vulnerable to major vote-tampering mischief before, during and after elections.

The MSNBC story reports that one examiner for the Iowa Secretary of State will recommend decertifying the Diebold voting machines as his response to the numerous, serious flaws uncovered during this study.

News.com.com.com [Isn't that one too many? - Ed] also picked up this story here. In that article, David Heller, project manager for Maryland's voting system implementation, naturally defends Diebold, likely because Maryland has recently signed a $55.6 million contract.

The original report from the Johns Hopkins study is available here in PDF.

The INQUIRER received some letters in response to our initial article, some thanking us for raising the issue, some not quite so positive.

Not counting the "Love It or Leave!" and "Move to France!" responses -- which were few, thankfully -- several nice correspondents expressed some disappointment that we would give space to such a left-wing advocate. It seemed they didn't understand that the examples of election fraud that I mentioned in introducing the story were all Democratic Party abuses, or appreciate that rigging elections is an equal opportunity temptation.

But those readers probably won't like some of the stories linked at the bottom of this article either, so I'll just suggest they avoid those.

However, let us simply observe that, if democracy is going work over the long run, not only must elections be honest and fair, but they must also be known to be honest and fair. As those four academic computer security researchers said, with the very first sentence of their final report:

"The essence of democracy is that everyone accepts the results of elections, even when they lose them." µ

L'INQS
Origins of American Vote Fraud
System Integrity Flaw Discovered at Diebold Election Systems
Inside a US Election Vote Counting Program
Bald-Faced Lies About Black-Box Voting Machines
How George W. Bush Won the 2004 Presidential Election