...and more on the current state of our "democracy"

This article from Black Box Voting is interesting.

Two Florida counties have rejected Diebold electronic voting machines after a hacker proved that the machines were hackable in ways Diebold has repeatedly asserted were impossible.

Specifically in the hack in question, the memory cards on the voting machines was pre-loaded with positive and negative votes, but marked as cleared so that it returned a "zero report". Once legitimate votes were cast, the pre-loaded positives and negatives were added in, and so the result of the test vote, which legitimately should have been 6-2 instead were reported to the central tabulator machine as 1-7, with no detection of the hack.

By the way, this is quite different from the 30-second hack Bev Harris demonstrated for Howard Dean and the world on television a year ago. In that case, it was shown that the Central Tabulator machine for the Diebold system keeps its votes in an unencrypted MS Access database file, which can be opened outside of the Diebold software system in MS Access and modified directly, thus changing the voting results undetectably by the Diebold machine.

Oh, and while Florida is throwing the machines out, Ohio legislators seem poised to exempt electronic voting machines from public scrutiny and make it illegal to challenge the vote count of any Federal election in Ohio.

Remember when we all grew up believing our vote actually counted?

Liam.