Don't get fooled again, Part III

Well here they go again. Some Early voters in Florida have been reporting problems with electronic voting machines, and wouldn’t you know it, there are reports that when one casts a vote for Democrat Jim Davis, the summary shows you voted for Charlie Crist, a Republican. Can you believe that – in Florida?

It’s been demonstrated again and again that the machines can be hacked, but here’s another one for you conspiracy theorists: a California based voting machine manufacturer owned by Venezuelans is being investigated by the Feds for possible ties to Hugo Chávez.

Diebold of course is the brand most in the news. For one thing its president is a Bush supporter, but like most American brands, the machines essential parts like motherboards and hard drives are made in China whence many alleged attempts at hacking US Government computers originate. I don’t think that hiding a malicious program in the boot sector of a hard drive is beyond the capacity of a Chinese grade school kid. Of course although their machines have failed every independent security test ever undertaken by a number of nationally-recognized authorities, Diebold considers all its software proprietary and there really isn’t any way to know what they’re doing without getting sued.

Sure there are paranoids everywhere and it’s easy to dismiss factual cases simply by calling them conspiracy theories, but consider Dr. Charles Corry, a PhD in Physics, listed in Who's Who in Science and Engineering, 4th through 9th Editions, 1998-2007 and who has served on the IEEE Voting Equipment Standards committee for 5 years. He thinks we’re getting screwed. He things they’re lying to us. We’ve been cheated twice in a row and it’s foolish to think we won’t be fooled again.