WHAT A DIFFERENCE NEWS EDITING MAKES:
Read 2 original articles about electronic voting insecurity, and see how a mainstream media blog post referencing these 2 articles comes to a false conclusion that favors machine voting, and potentially misleads readers into believing that this conclusion comes from the original articles.
First, read an article from Phil Rogers of NBC Chicago.
January 7, 2011
Argonne National Laboratory security chief Roger Johnston concludes: "most voting machines have almost no security to reveal tampering", and who has demonstrated a variety of circumstances in which the machines can be hacked.
Then, read an earlier article by Researchers from Princeton (Andrew W. Appel, Maia Ginsburg, Brian W. Kernighan, Christopher D. Richards) and Lehigh University (Gang Tan), and independent voting integrity researcher Harri Hursti.
October 5, 2010
"The AVC Advantage contains a computer. If someone installs a different computer program for that computer to run, it can deliberately add up the votes wrong. It's easy to make a computer program that steals votes from one party's candidates, and gives them to another, while taking care to make the total number of votes come out right. It's easy to make this program take care to cheat only on election day when hundreds of ballots are cast, and not cheat when the machine is being tested for accuracy. This kind of fraudulent computer program can modify every electronic 'audit trail' in the computer."
Finally, read the Computerworld blog of Sharon Machlis.
January 7, 2011
Sharon Machlis references the above two articles, but then comes to the false conclusion: "A paper trail is necessary so if questions arise about an election results -- say, results significantly differ from scientifically valid exit polls, a standard used to check for fraud by election overseers in other nations -- there's a way to double-check results that can bypass potentially flawed software counts."
**** Sharon Machlis' conclusion is false because although electronic audit trails are indeed not good enough to detect fraud, this does not mean that a paper trail will make the audit trails good enough to detect fraud; the insecure machines can easily be hacked to produce a false paper trail to conceal their fraud. Due to the way this article is titled and written, it might lead a reader to believe that this conclusion came from the articles that it references (noted above), but this is not the case. Unfortunately, this is the article that most of the public is most likely to see; this demonstrates the need for diligence in reading the news, and the importance of alternatives to the mainstream (corporate-controlled) media. ****
