[extropy-chat] Re: Politics: US talks of suspending elections

[Harvey Newstrom]

Adrian Tymes writes: 

> Not all the states.  California, at least, has banned
> the use of logless voting machines, and is making an
> effort to crack down on potential ways to hack them.

Yes.  California leads the way here.  I think this was in part due to 
Diebold getting caught sneaking undocumented upgrades into production voting 
machines and then lying about it.  It demonstrated how unreliable the system 
is, and that the lack of audit logs makes it impossible to figure out what 
really happened.  I.E., they already got stung by the lack of logs when 
something happened and they couldn't go back and figure out what.  I am 
afraid that most states won't realize the importance of this until they, 
too, are directly harmed by the lack of logs.  Then they will want them. 

> But I don't think the Republicans as a whole are to
> blame.  There are people responsible for this, and
> people fighting this, from both political parties.

Republicans tend to own all the companies pushing these machines, and all 
the debates here in Washington seem to roughly divided by party lines.  
Florida is the key to this debate.  Democrats who supported recounts in 
Florida want that ability in the future.  Republicans who opposed recounts 
in Florida want to prevent that possibility in the future. 

 --
Harvey Newstrom, CISSP, CISA, CISM, IAM, IBMCP, GSEC
<HarveyNewstrom.com>