HACKING THE VOTE

Pac-man, courtesy of Wikimedia

Pac-man ate my ballot?

As jazz artist Gil Scott-Heron has already informed us, The revolution will not be televised (play the track while you read, if you like).  Indeed, it has already surely happened (without bloodshed) in our election follies.  And We-the-people are chumps for allowing it!  Sadly, I must concede that Donald Trump is right:  the election process has been, is, and will be rigged.  Thru incompetence and a snoozing electorate we have lost our electoral franchise, as detailed in this fine (if lengthy) article titled How to hack an election in seven minutes.  You will be entertained and edified by reading even a portion of it.  May we rise to our duty as citizens to demand paper trails and unhackable aggregation!

A few quotes to whet your appetite:  “In less than a minute, they infected a Diebold machine with self-duplicating code, spreading from machine to machine through an administrator card, and programmed it to swing an election for Benedict Arnold over George Washington.”  “But most [experts] identified Pennsylvania as the greatest concern. There, according to Verified Voting 47 counties of 67 vote on digital voting machines without a written backup record if something were to go awry. . .”  “Then there are tech advancements that make the computer scientists shudder: To a person, they each warned me about the public’s new delusion, one strikingly reminiscent of the aftermath of Bush v. Gore—Internet voting.” 

 

Photo by Alex Halderman.

Photo by Alex Halderman.