Going back many years has been the dispute between those who believe that black box voting machines were actively being hacked, and those who believe that while it was possible, it had no real effect. Well, the results are in:
http://www.bradblog.com/...
A cross-partisan conspiracy has been uncovered going back to 2002. Insider election officials did indeed do the thing we computer experts all feared all along. On non-verifiable machines, they exploited a small user-interface feature to miseducate voters about how to use the machine. They convinced people that they had in fact already voted, when instead they left the voting booth with the machine in a state that it would be easy to change the votes and then finally confirm it. In this way, they actually changed the results of local elections for pay. The corruption came from officials on both sides of the aisle.
The naive thought that these people should be trusted just because, and that machines shouldn't be hardened to become more foolproof and user-verifiable has now been shown to be laughable. Any self-respecting engineer has known this for a long time, because we adhere to the sound principles of Murphy's Law. If it can go wrong it will. It is our job as engineers to insure that it cannot go wrong. It will, it did, and people have been arrested for it. There have also been many such cases which have gone undetected, with national results. Think Saxby Chambliss.
All I can say is I told you so. Thanks so much. Please support the open voting consortium.