A new
report by the University of Connecticut shows once again how Diebold uses virtually non-existant security measures to protect their voting machines. But this time, their optical scan machines were the target of attack.
According to Avi Ruben:
The authors show that "even if the memory card is sealed and pre-election testing is performed, one can carry out a devastating array of attacks against an election using only off-the-shelf equipment and without having ever to access the card physically or opening the AV-OS system box." The attacks presented in the paper include manipulating the count so that no votes for a particular candidate are counted, swapping votes for two candidates, and reporting the results incorrectly based on biases that are triggered under certain conditions.
This report, coming on the heals of the
Princeton Report may finally prompt the media to look into how Diebold's use of such faulty security measures may in fact be intentional. It's difficult to imagine a competent systems engineer designing machines with such loose security unless they were instructed to do so.
And it once again raises the big question of why such a vital part of our democracy --the counting of votes-- was privatized in the first place? The answer, of course, is that the people who run this country believe the only legitimate function of government is to provide for the common defense --and to collect large sums of money through taxes that can then be distributed to their close friends. To them, everything else must be privatized.
We must assert the opposite: that some aspects of life do not respond well to a profit motive. Voting is certainly one of those. Counting votes is a legitimate function of government! The utterly disastrous voting experiences we've seen these past six years of privatized counting proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt. It's time we once again demand that local election boards count our votes rather than private companies!
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