To determine what it would take to hack a U.S. election, a team of cybersecurity experts turned to a fictional battleground state called Pennasota and a fictional gubernatorial race between Tom Jefferson and Johnny Adams. It's the year 2007, and the state uses electronic voting machines.
Jefferson was forecast to win the race by about 80,000 votes, or 2.3 percent of the vote. Adams's conspirators thought, "How easily can we manipulate the election results?"
The experts thought about all the ways to do it. And they concluded in a report issued yesterday that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the outcome.
The report, which was unveiled at a Capitol Hill news conference by New York University's Brennan Center for Justice and billed as the most authoritative to date, tackles some of the most contentious questions about the security of electronic voting.
The report concluded that the three major electronic voting systems in use have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities. But it added that most of these vulnerabilities can be overcome by auditing printed voting records to spot irregularities. And while 26 states require paper records of votes, fewer than half of those require regular audits.
No wonder the republicans fight this issue so hard.
If democrats don't get on the ball and make this a national issue, we can kiss honest elections in this country goodbye. Forever. That is, if we haven't already.
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2 comments:
How are you going, mate? It was ultimately because of this issue that my wife and I emigrated to Australia last year. (Luckily, I'm a registered nurse, so I could get a work visa here.) We were morally repulsed by the slaughter our tax dollars helped pay for in Iraq, and are scared shiteless about America's slide into fascism. We would have stayed to fight on, as we did before the latest Gulf War and the 2004 election, but the system is so crook (as the Ozzies put it) that we figure there's no hope. It's going to take an economic implosion (which is coming) and massive social disruption before an un-cheatable mass of people rise up to say "Get rid of these bastards!" I'm too old and bourgeois for burning and gunfire, so I'm down here where life really is better. "No worries!" as the unofficial national motto goes. For me, that is. I wish you the best of luck. Good onya, mate, because you're correct.
Thanks bukko. I'm hanging in, but it gets harder everyday.
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