Voting Machines Hackable

Wake up, America. Your rights are in jeopardy. Florida’s supervisor of elections in Tallahassee has determined that his workers have been able to hack into a voting machine and change the outcome of a vote without leaving any kind of trail. Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho said the same thing may have happened in Volusia County during the 2000 election.

You might recall that during that election in precinct 216, a memory card subtracted 200 votes from Gore and added 16,000 votes for Bush… in a precinct with only 600 voters.

Sancho said of the vote hack, “The expert that we used simply programmed it on his laptop in his hotel room.”

This information should be setting off alarm bells and klaxons in abundance. Put aside for a moment the candidates in the 2000 election or any other election for that matter, and focus on the most important detail: electronic voting machines can be hacked . They may well have been hacked already to change the outcome of one or more elections. Understand that the vote is the basis of democracy. To interfere with the vote is to undermine the foundations of our whole system of government. This is serious.

Yet what are the top news items today? As of this writing, it’s a South Korean being accused of faking stem cell research and locked horns in the European Union over spending. In US news, the top stories are about a defense bill, a New York transit strike and more spending on relief in New Orleans. In Google US News (a good gauge for what top newspapers are reporting right now), this story, arguably the most important story in the last 5 years, doesn’t appear at all.

The potential undermining of the whole of the government of the most powerful nation on the planet singularly fails to grab anyone’s attention. This is our representative democracy we’re talking about! This is your most fundamental right: one person, one vote! There’s a threat to take it away from you. You must pay attention!

Now is the time to take action, before the next election. Find your state and your federal representatives and fax them. Don’t email them. Email is going to be ignored. Tell them you demand your right as an American citizen to have your vote counted correctly and accurately, and to have no votes counted that can’t be attributed to real citizens. No more of this 16,000 extra votes for a candidate in a precinct that has 600 voters. No more manipulation of the vote counts. Everything must have a paper trail. And any company caught selling faulty, hackable voting machines must have all of its machines decertified and must reimburse the states for all costs incurred in replacing them with legitimate machines. In addition, punitive damages against these companies must reflect the serious nature of the crime of undermining democracy.

Don’t wait. Do it now. Our most fundamental right is at stake!

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