If you are a California resident, or follow California politics, you'll remember Deborah Bowen as someone we simply HAD to get elected to office last year.
Fortunately, we succeeded. Bowen ran on a promise to restore integrity to the election process here in California. She's already doing a great job:
A team of hackers commissioned by California Secretary of State Deborah Bowen managed to hack into electronic voting machines made by three of the four largest suppliers in the industry, Diebold, Hart InterCivic, and Sequoia Voting Systems.
The results were shocking to many, and should result in the decertification of these machines in the state of California.
More ...
Check out this quote:
Even taking such objections into account, the results were worse than even the e-voting skeptics had expected.
"I had expected them to find problems -- but to be able to replace firmware in all three systems is nothing short of an utter takeover of machines, and that shouldn't be possible," Avi Rubin, professor of computer science and technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, told TechNewsWorld.
"I was shocked by how severe the problems were," he continued. "What's even scarier is that the researchers were looking at certified systems that have been already used in an election."
Nice, huh?
We need more public servants like Deborah Bowen. This quote sums it all up perfectly:
Bowen says she will decide this week whether to allow the compromised systems to be used in the next election. Lawmakers in Washington aren't moving nearly so swiftly; Democrats are still debating whether to push improvements to voting technology by the 2008 race.
Throw the bums out.