HACK THE VOTE

Wired magazine tracks some of the work of Bev Harris, a voting activist who has been sounding the alarm about the vulnerability of electronic voting systems and the astounding lack of attention paid to safeguards of Democracy's foundation.

The piece details some of the ex-felons, hackers, embezzlers and Republicans connected to the firms that will run voting machines in almost every state this coming election. It also includes this doozy:

Harris documented 56 cases in which software flaws were implicated in miscounts and wrote an account of them (PDF) on her website. "I didn't finish (finding cases)," she said. "I just got tired of writing." ...

The most famous example of election flipping occurred in the hotly contested 2000 presidential election in Florida when the tabulation system for Diebold's optical-scan system subtracted votes from Al Gore's total. While hanging chads distracted the nation, a few people noticed that in a Volusia County precinct where only 412 people voted, a Diebold system actually deleted votes for Gore, giving him minus 16,022 votes. Bush received 2,813 votes. Some news media had already called the win (PDF, see page 20) for Bush when someone noticed the numbers.

Need more evidence? Check out Harris's site, Black Box Voting: Ballot - Tampering in the 21st Century.