In the past few elections, the country and public, at large, has called into question the reliability of the current voting system. The most notable case is likely that of the hanging chad in Florida.
The event, which took place at the outcome of the 2000 election, held the nation’s attention, as political pundits contemplated the winner of the state. Would it be Al Gore? Perhaps George W. Bush would be the next president? Of course, while some would suggest it was due to the support of his brother, Bush took the lead with approximately 50,000 votes, Gore conceded and the rest is history. Still, it wasn’t over, at this point. Gore’s political team went up in arms, as they demanded a recount. Still, Bush won the state, and ultimately the election. Although it was a democrat, who was questioning the voting system, it is usually the republican candidate, who bashes the system. Perhaps this has something to do with being on the losing end of too many elections? This has forced a battle in congress regarding voter ID laws and republicans being accused of racial biased for trying to block out those of any descent besides Caucasian. Whether or not the GOP are racist bigots remains to be seen, but it is certainly true that losers of the election will always have an excuse. In fact, an excuse is already being implemented for the 2016 election! Unsurprisingly, this time around, the potential candidates will be able to blame a more digital enemy. According to the NPR, the state of Virginia is worried about the potential of hackers infiltrating and manipulating the voting machines, within their precincts. Unsurprisingly, an audit was preformed and the results are laughable. Although the investigators were unable to find any type of cellular interference with the devices and their mobile phones, they actually discovered something even more laughable! Suffice to say, the investigators were able to effortlessly connect to the voting machine’s wireless network. Of course, the real kicker is what happened next. While connected to this system, they were able to manipulate the tallied votes, but it doesn’t stop there either. Unfortunately, the government officials in charge of the election in Virginia are only able to comprehend simple number and letter sequences. With this knowledge, the state investigators were able to guess the passwords of the systems, which were actually protected. Suffice to say, “abcde” isn’t a suitable password, especially when the country is at risk! So what is exactly the solution here? According to city officials in Fairfax City, they’ll need $130,000 to replace their voting systems. Of course, they do no want to spend the money and see no point in changing. As the city’s general registrar, Kevin Linehan, suggests upgrading to a new system could actually put the voters at risk, cause you know those new machines are insanely dangerous! So, what will really happen in the 2016 election? We’d all be better off compiling voter’s names and votes into a PDF file and trying to convert PDF to Excel. After that, we’ll simply perform a major encryption process and send the votes to the North Pole. Than, nobody will be able to complain.