Wake Up

With Bush out there still acting like a buffoon, and the only strategy of the Republican party apparently being to present a completely false picture of itself during the convention, you knew there had to be a backup plan (in case the whole Swift Boat Liars for Bush thing doesn’t work out either):

Manipulation technique found in the Diebold central tabulator — 1,000 of these systems are in place, and they count up to two million votes at a time.

By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.

This program is not “stupidity” or sloppiness. It was designed and tested over a series of a dozen version adjustments.

This is why they don’t want to provide a way to manually recount the votes….such a recount might show that the vote totals reported by Diebold’s system were different from the votes actually cast. It’s hard not to be a conspiracy theorist when such a big vulnerability, which has been pointed out over and over, is left intact.

[via Boing Boing]