voting machine

Last week, two election workers in Ohio got sentenced to 18 months in prison for rigging a recount in the 2004 presidential election. Now our new Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner has asked the election board members to resign or be fired:

All four election board members for Cuyahoga County, troubled by recount rigging charges and voting machine problems, have been told to resign or face being fired, a state official said Monday.

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said she called the four board members of Ohio's most populous count late Sunday, asking them to leave by the close of business Wednesday.

The county, which includes all of Cleveland, has had difficulty adjusting to electronic voting. Last May's primary, the first attempt at electronic voting in the county, was marred by absent or poorly trained poll workers, lost vote-holding computer cards and a polling place that opened hours late

If these convictions would have come down 6 months ago, nothing would have happened on the state level. This is what happens when you got a proactive Secretary of State, as compared to Ken Blackwell, who did nothing.

This story came out yesterday and at first I kind of skimmed over it. I went
back for a reread this morning and got thinking about it a little more and now
that I have, it is starting to piss me off.

The story is from WESH
in Florida. They talk about some of the Diebold voting machines used in
elections there and say its possible some were hacked in 2000.

There's new evidence that computer hackers could change election results
without anyone knowing about it, WESH 2 News reported.

The supervisor of elections in Tallahassee tested voting machines several
times over the last several months, and on Monday, his workers were able to
hack into a voting machine and change the outcome. He said that same thing
might have happened in Volusia County in 2000.

The big controversy revolves around a little black computer card that is
smaller than a floppy disk and bigger than a flash drive. The card is
inserted into voting machines that scan paper ballots. The card serves as
the machine's electronic brain.

But when Ion Sancho, Leon County's Supervisor of Elections, tested the
Diebold system and allowed experts to manipulate the card electronically, he
could change the outcome of a mock election without leaving any kind of
trail. In other words, someone could fix an election and no one would know.

"The expert that we used simply programmed it on his laptop in his hotel
room," Sancho said.

Sancho began investigating the problem after watching the votes come in
during the infamous 2000 presidential election. In Volusia County precinct
216, a memory card added more than 200 votes to George W. Bush's total and
subtracted 16,000 votes from Al Gore. The mistake was later corrected during
a hand count.