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By Farhad Manjoo

Aug. 24, 2004 | Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, a corporate lawyer and a
former president of the Miami chapter of the American Civil Liberties
Union, vividly remembers the moment she became an election reform
activist. It was on Sept. 10, 2002, when she saw yet another election
in South Florida go unfathomably awry -- this time a primary
election, the first vote in which her county, Miami-Dade, and several
neighboring counties would use electronic voting machines at the
polls.

"It was jarring," she recalls. The poll workers didn't know how to
run the new touch-screen machines. The voters didn't know how to vote
on the machines. Some of the systems didn't work at all; they
displayed incorrect selections, froze up, acted generally odd. "What
moved me to action was seeing all these people -- elderly black folks
standing in line for hours without being able to vote, fanning
themselves in the hot sun, waiting for the machines to start working
so they could get their chance," Rodriguez-Taseff says. "And then,
seeing the people coming out of the polls with their eyes dazed over,
shocked and amazed by what had happened. They couldn't understand why
when they pressed a button next to one candidate, the machine brought
up another candidate's name."

Accounts of the perils of electronic voting systems are nothing new.
In the last couple of years, it seems we've all heard stories like
Rodriguez-Taseff's -- tales of machines breaking down during
elections, of systems displaying erroneous selections, of machines
behaving badly. When computer security experts have examined some of
the voting machines now widely in use, they've discovered enormous
security problems. In January, for instance, a team at RABA
Technologies, a computer consulting firm in Maryland, managed to
devise a half-dozen ways of compromising the votes in touch-screen
machines manufactured by Diebold, which produces the systems to be
used in Maryland and Georgia this year. (A PDF file of their report
can be found here. ) And who hasn't heard that voting machine firms
may have close relationships with certain politicians? Diebold's CEO
is famous online for declaring, in his role as a major Bush-Cheney
fundraiser, that he's "committed to helping Ohio deliver its
electoral votes to the president next year."

...

http://salon.com/tech/feature/2004/08/24/machines/

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