BREAKING: MSM acknowledges e-voting vulnerability

Today the WaPo had a major piece about the vulnerabilities of electronic voting machines, entitled A Single Person Could Swing an Election.  [Apologies if this has already been diaried, I did a perfunctory search but did not see it.]

This could mark a "tipping point" on the media treatment of election fraud.  About time.  More below the fold.

The experts thought about all the ways to do it. And they concluded in a report issued yesterday that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the outcome.

The report, which was unveiled at a Capitol Hill news conference by New York University's Brennan Center for Justice and billed as the most authoritative to date, tackles some of the most contentious questions about the security of electronic voting.

The article is short enough I can't quote too much of it here, but needless to say the culprits protest it's not their fault.  However:

Republican Reps. Tom Cole (Okla.) and Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, joined Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) in calling for a law that would set strict requirements for electronic voting machines. Howard Schmidt, former chief of security at Microsoft and President Bush's former cybersecurity adviser, also endorsed the Brennan report.

"It's not a question of 'if,' it's a question of 'when,' " Davis said of an attempt to manipulate election results.

Update: Looking at the volume and passion of response to this diary, I would venture that any 2008 candidate that brings this issue forward as a key one in his campaign (as both a symptom and a cause of how the average American has been politically and economically disenfranchised) will attract a groundswell of support from the netroots. It will be interesting to see what happens...

I would also throw my own $0.02 in, and say that as an IT Architect with 25 years experience, I profoundly distrust e-voting technology and can tell you that the hardware is easily tampered with, the software has design flaws that make it easy to hack, and the physical security practices associated with the devices are virtually non-existant.

Many respondents below use the analogy of ATMs, and I would say that is exactly the standard we should apply here. If we can make money machines secure and trustworthy, we can and make voting machines secure and trustworthy, and we should demand it be so.