The continuing voting machine farce
Wired News observed a training session for poll workers in Alameda County in California, and were surprised by what they saw:
Alameda County uses 4,000 touch-screen voting machines manufactured by Diebold Election Systems. But last month, officials in Maryland released a report saying that the Diebold machines were “at high risk of compromise” due to security flaws in the software. Despite this, officials in Alameda County said their policies and procedures for using the machines will secure them against voting fraud.
However, information obtained by Wired News at a training session for Alameda County poll workers indicates that security lapses in the use of the equipment and poor worker training could expose the election to serious tampering.
The basic problem is that the county election officials apparently have no real grasp of how vulnerable these new machines are, and therefore aren’t taking the necessary security steps (both physical and electronic) to prevent tampering. It’s pretty scary stuff, and further evidence that, rather than making elections more fair and accurate, the new machines may well have just the opposite effect.
