Courtesy of BradBlog: Researchers at the University of Connecticut have concluded that the VVPAT, heralded by supporters of the Holt Bill, is meaningless as verification of a voter's selection. Using only information available to the public, experts at the University of Connecticut were able to change a voter's selection within the Diebold computerized voting machine, while presenting a paper trail which gave the voter the false impression that his vote was recorded correctly. Here is the report.
This news comes a week after California's Secretary of State Debra Bowen's top-to-bottom review (summarized here), which demonstrated numerous security flaws for the three computerized voting machines tested (Diebold, Hart InterCivic and Sequoia).
http://www.bradblog.com/...
Optical scanning did not fare much better. This article from
The Miami Herald on Tuesday, reported that Diebold's optical scanner could be easily programmed to switch votes in complete secrecy.
This begs the question, if hand counted paper ballots can be used less expensively than computer DRE's and with none of the electronic hacking issues, why do we continue to use unnecessarily sophisticated technology to obfuscate vote-counting?