alienation news

Electronic voting machines: making tampering even easier

An apparent exposé of a huge security flaw in the United States voting system. Computer-savvy minds are still debating the significance of what appeared on the Scoop website. So far, the mainstream US media have ignored the Scoop story, but it ignited fierce debate across the Internet, drew huge traffic to the Scoop site, and fed increasing controversy over electronic voting machines.
Think of the US and the overwhelming image is of a president who got fewer votes than his rival, yet still got the top job thanks to massive confusion in the state in which his brother is governor.
Last year President Bush signed into law the Help America Vote Act, which will provide almost $6.8 billion to states to buy new electronic voting machines. By next year, many US voters will cast their ballot on controversial touch-screen machines, which don't provide a paper audit trail, owned by a small number of private companies who keep their software secret.
US writer named Bev Harris, author of a soon-to-be published book called Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century discovered a public file transfer site that contained up to 40,000 files, including manuals, source codes, and a vote counting system that she and Thompson say contains a trapdoor that could allow someone to alter the data.