Keith Devens .com

Voting machine "irregularities"

Steve Dekorte linked to this article on voting irregularities due to machine errors. Jeff Fisher, "the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District" claims to have evidence the machines were hacked. I searched Google News on Jeff's name and found this extensive article. Here's what it says about Jeff's claim:

Is there any evidence that vote totals were deliberately tampered with by people who had a stake in the outcome? Nothing specific has been documented to date. Jeff Fisher, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District, claims to have evidence that the Florida election was hacked, and says further that he knows who hacked it and how it was done. Such evidence is not yet forthcoming.

In any case, I'll be keeping an eye on this (Update: I've set up a Google News alert on Jeff Fischer). Simon had a post right after the election talking about voting machine errors in Diebold machines. I left a comment saying how I think there has to be a paper trail. Personally, I'd be happier if everyone had to fill out a paper by hand, sign it, and have it hand-counted. Plus, everything I've ever heard about Diebold machines has made me uneasy about their reliability. At the very least, electronic voting machines have to have every level of their software stack be open source and open to inspection. And the vote tallies shouldn't be able to be this easily accessed (no pun intended):

Harris then proceeded to open a laptop computer that had on it the software used to tabulate the votes by one of the aforementioned central processors. Journalist Thom Hartman describes what happened next [links to article linked above]: "So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS tabulation software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the 'My Computer' icon, choose 'Local Disk C:,' open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder 'LocalDB' which, Harris noted, 'stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes.' Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled Central Tabulator Votes,' which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel. 'Let's just flip those,' Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, 'We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds.'"

Do I think this type of stuff could have happened and accounted for 300,000 votes? No. But just because the election came out for Bush (which I'm very happy about) it doesn't mean I don't want these issues to be A. investigated, and B. resolved to ensure they can't happen in the future.