After reading these reports, Blackwell advised all Ohio counties to purchase these machines. He is running for Governor on the November ballot, as well as administering Ohio's election. (He also owned stock in Diebold until he was publicly embarrassed into selling it.)
All of the nation's Chief Election Officers are duty-bound to have read these reports when they were issued, and to take steps to inform and protect the public whom they serve. At least, that is how a democracy is run.
Media Iron Curtain
Of print media, Rolling Stones is an exception in that it listed its sources for the June 2006, 11,000-word article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. "But if you were looking in the five or six days afterward for follow-up stories, investigations or even a mention in the P-I, its cross-town competitor or just about any other major U.S. newspaper, you were almost certainly disappointed," opined Kenneth F. Bunting of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
"To his credit, CNN's Wolf Blitzer aired a brief and not-very-illuminating interview with Kennedy late the next day after the Rolling Stone issue hit the newsstands. There was a brief mention on the Lou Dobbs report later that same evening and MSNBC got around to mentioning the article's assertions several days later." http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061106C.shtml00
Television's Comedy Central has a better track record of exposing e-voting weaknesses, partisan election administration, and the court cases that uphold both. Several episodes are clipped into the film, "Stealing America" by producer Dorothy Fadiman. www.stealingamerica.org
All e-Voting Technology is Suspect
Optical scan systems, as well as DREs, are subject to tampering by switching memory cards. National Science Foundation Director of ACCURATE, Avi Rubin, reported to Forbes Magazine in August of 2006. He wrote:
"Why am I advocating the use of 17th-century technology for voting in the 21st century?
The boot loader controls which operating system, so it is the most security-critical piece of the machine. To (install overwriting software), a night janitor at the polling place would need only a few seconds' worth of access to the computer's memory card slot.
If the defense against the attack is not built into the voting system, the attack will work, and there are virtually limitless ways to attack a(n electronic) system."
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/0904/040.html?partner=alerts&_requestid=2972
There are five ways to hack a hand-counted (HCPB) system. Party hacks can 1) drive voters around to vote more than once, 2) pay or threaten voters to vote a certain way, and 3) counterfeit the ballot and have voters stuff more than one ballot into the ballot box. Election Officials can 4) give false results (variety of methods, based on local conditions) and 5) prevent people from voting (variety of methods, based on local conditions).
Appropriate security measures exist for each HCPB attack vector, and are beyond the scope of this article. Several current authorities have written on these issues, including the Inter-Parliamentary Union, an organization comprised of 219 nations, which published its 200-page "Free and Fair Elections" manual in Geneva this year.
Campaign strategists have 06 sewn up, with the theft and dissemination of Diebold election system memory cards.
Resources:
Black Box Report SECURITY ALERT: July 4, 2005 Critical Security Issues with Diebold Optical Scan Design (1.94w) http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVtsxstudy.pdf
Brennan Center final report: http://www.brennancenter.org/Machinery%20of%20Democracy-%20Full%208.8.06.pdf
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