Truthdiggers of the Week: The Voting Machine Crusaders

Truthdig salutes all the journalists, activists and researchers who have been working to expose the security flaws of electronic voting machines—an underappreciated endeavor that is essential to the safeguarding of our democracy.

Among journalists, perhaps no single reporter has pursued this story with more tenacity than Brad Friedman. His blog, BradBlog, is a daily must-read for everyone who wants to keep tabs on this subject, and he has used the platform to break several national stories.

Check out BradBlog here.

Truthdig also salutes activist Bev Harris, whose crusade to expose the vulnerability of America’s voting machines was chronicled in the Nov. 2 HBO documentary “Hacking Democracy.” Harris, a Seattle grandmother who took it upon herself to start asking critical questions about the machines that count 80 percent of the votes in the United States, is executive director of Black Box Voting Inc., an advocacy group opposed to computer voting methods without open source codes.

Learn more about Harris and “Hacking Democracy” here.

Finally, Truthdig shines the spotlight on Princeton computer professor Edward W. Felten and two graduate students, Ariel J. Feldman and J. Alex Halderman, whose research proved that anyone with a screwdriver and a flash memory card could successfully hack a Diebold machine in a minute or two.

Their research paper and accompanying video are here.

From top left, clockwise: activist Bev Harris, journalist Brad Friedman, Princeton University professor Edward W. Felten, a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, Princeton graduate student J. Alex Halderman.