E-Voting Firm Hacked

from the makes-you-wonder dept

While lots of people have pointed out the risks of electronic voting, now a story is coming out that one firm providing e-voting technology has been hacked. Of course, it sounds like the break-in was on their corporate network, and not of the voting system itself, but this is the sort of thing that will make people think twice about trusting electronic voting systems. In fact, the company thinks that the break-in may have been motivated by political reasons.
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  • identicon
    djspicerack, 29 Dec 2003 @ 12:45pm

    political motivation

    I had posted on this earlier on my blog, and was really curious about the 'political motivation' between hacking this company - do you think they're owning up to who the culprit might be or is it just speculation?

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Chad, 29 Dec 2003 @ 5:21pm

    No Subject Given

    Nothing to see here, folks. Look! Michael Jackson! Scott Peterson!

    j/k...anyway maybe this hack was done to make the point of how insecure electronic voting is?? Hopefully it didn't actually affect anything.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 29 Dec 2003 @ 10:55pm

    American "representitive" democracy is a joke...

    You know, I always find it fun to remind people that our current president is primarily a product of the CIA (you know... that institution responsible for insuring unmanagable democracries don't pop up all over the world). After all, your daddy doesn't get to be directory of the CIA without being able to fix a few elections here and there... and certainly by the time he leaves the CIA, without a doubt he has honed his election fixing skill. With Jeb in place and a very good understanding of Sun-Belt demographics, the end result was an inevitability.

    Beyond the banality of the American 2 party system, I believe Richard Nixon was quite interested in electronic voting. I'm not sure if it was the tech briefs from our missle program or some of the stuff going on in Chile, but the fact of the matter was that Nixon interested in using electronic voting to his favor (esp. considering what happened to him in Chicago... and keep in mind that the Chicago machine is the granddaddy of all distric election fraud). Anyone who didn't look back in the aftermath of the 2000 election, watching the mechanics of democracy work with inspectors peering a balots looking for pregnant chad, and didn't think "what an ungodly clusterfuck this process of democracy has become" is simply not being honest with themselves.

    Believe it or not, there are other countries out there with less out dated, more effective and just plain better voting systems and effective democracries than the good old USA (the supposed be all, end all of "democracy")... Just to name a few, consider Austrailia, New Zealand or Brazil (what most Americans would probably consider to be a thrid world nation).

    The current state of the voting apparatus in the USA is a direct reflection of the degree of seriousness with which the American voter respects the "democracy" under which they live. Apathy and fraud are rapant. The choices don't matter and even if they did, the majority might not win. The entire process in the USA is a broken crock of shit... and the American public knows. Just introducing electronic voting won't fix this.

    The only way that I'll ever accept electronic voting is if:

    1 - we move to a direct democracy (no more electoral college gerrymandering of the people's choice)

    2 - there is an anonymous audit trail that I can use to go back to verify my vote all the way to the canidate that is seeking electon.

    3 - there is a system to insure that the majority of voters verify their vote (an electon fund that provides $50 per voter for verifying their vote). I see nothing wrong with paying people (in cash) to verify their vote. Other countries fine their people for not voting. Personally, I think this is slightly backwards, but the idea is similar.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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