You Can Buy Anything Online: Even An Election*
from the enhancing-the-voting-experience dept
With so many stories about problems and vulnerabilities with e-voting machines, there are lots of conspiracy theories out there about how any particular campaign might go about "fixing" an election. Well, as with so many good ideas these days, it appears someone has set up a nice website to make it that much easier. In what is clearly a clever bit of satire, someone has set up a website called fixavote.com that is supposedly from a company called Election Partners or Election Consultants. The site uses ambiguous, yet hilarious, language to basically suggest that they'll hack the vote in any particular election area, if it uses e-voting machines: "By leveraging existing electronic voting technology, Election Consultants enhances the voting experience, which ultimately ensures a desirable election outcome." It also includes services such as: "real-time voter correction" and (my favorite) "enhanced retrospective tallying." The people behind the site won't admit that it's satire (as with any good satirist). However, in the PC World article above, the guy does say that about 30 political campaigns have contacted him. This could be entirely made up as well, but it would definitely be amusing to find out that this is actually a honeypot to try to draw out campaigns that are actually looking to hack the vote.* Note: Election buying not valid in districts without e-voting machines.
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trademarks?
Doesn't Karl Rove already this trademarked?
I can see some litigation coming on this one!
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Cease-and-Desist
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re: cease & desist
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Realistically though, it makes me wonder why the FBI/CIA has never thought to run such a sting opperation. They're okay with doing drug and prostitution sting ops, but evidently protecting US citizens from political corruption is a hands-off area. :(
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Genuis
This sounds like the sort of thing that a campaign might throw a couple hundred grand at just in case. And even better when they loose they wont be able to sue anyone because that would be an admission of fraud.
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Google Bombing
Of course, another way would be a massive groundswell of Google Bombing during a campaign
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Re: Google Bombing
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The ones we use are quite simple as compared to the Diebold ones and do not have any touch screens or sophisticated computers. It is a small device which can operate on a 6V battery pack. You can read more about the EVM and the diferenced between it and Diebold at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_voting_machines and
http://techaos.blogspot.com/2004/05/indian-evm-compared-with-diebold.html
Sometimes a low-tech solution is better than a high-tech one.
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