Salon: The downloading of the president '04 (Voting Machines)

[kskiska]

Will fears about the new voting machines keep voters away from the polls? And what's going on in Florida, anyway?

Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, a corporate lawyer and a former president of the Miami chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, vividly remembers the moment she became an election reform activist. It was on Sept. 10, 2002, when she saw yet another election in South Florida go unfathomably awry -- this time a primary election, the first vote in which her county, Miami-Dade, and several neighboring counties would use electronic voting machines at the polls.

"It was jarring," she recalls. The poll workers didn't know how to run the new touch-screen machines. The voters didn't know how to vote on the machines. Some of the systems didn't work at all; they displayed incorrect selections, froze up, acted generally odd. "What moved me to action was seeing all these people -- elderly black folks standing in line for hours without being able to vote, fanning themselves in the hot sun, waiting for the machines to start working so they could get their chance," Rodriguez-Taseff says. "And then, seeing the people coming out of the polls with their eyes dazed over, shocked and amazed by what had happened. They couldn't understand why when they pressed a button next to one candidate, the machine brought up another candidate's name."

Accounts of the perils of electronic voting systems are nothing new. In the last couple of years, it seems we've all heard stories like Rodriguez-Taseff's -- tales of machines breaking down during elections, of systems displaying erroneous selections, of machines behaving badly. When computer security experts have examined some of the voting machines now widely in use, they've discovered enormous security problems. In January, for instance, a team at RABA Technologies, a computer consulting firm in Maryland, managed to devise a half-dozen ways of compromising the votes in touch-screen machines manufactured by Diebold, which produces the systems to be used in Maryland and Georgia this year. (A PDF file of their report can be found here.) And who hasn't heard that voting machine firms may have close relationships with certain politicians? Diebold's CEO is famous online for declaring, in his role as a major Bush-Cheney fundraiser, that he's "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

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http://salon.com/tech/feature/2004/08/24/machines/index.html