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.
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.
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A Diebold voting machine with the ironic name of "AccuVote" was impounded after a voter in Colorado's Adams County noticed that the machine wouldn't take a vote for a Democratic state Senate candidate. Luckily, the ever-vigilant Brad Blog is on the case.
In this apparently leaked clip from the slated Nov. 2 episode of "The Simpsons," the original "Joe Sixpack," Homer Simpson, tangles with a voting machine as he attempts to cast his vote for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Who will prevail?
Diebold Election Systems is no more, having been spun off by its parent company and renamed Premier Election Solutions. The troubled voting machine maker has been plagued by controversy from the start, due to the frequently documented vulnerabilities of its election equipment.
Truthdig tips its hat this week to California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who did her constituency proud by heading off potential voting disasters in her state by ruling out the use of Diebold and Sequoia direct recording electronic (DRE) voting systems in upcoming elections, with exceptions made for disabled voters.
It turns out Diebold uses a universal key to access its voting machines, meaning that anyone who has one, a minute of free time and a little know-how can steal an election without a trace. What's worse, the company made an image of the key available on its website, allowing at least one viewer to produce multiple working copies.
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