Rigging an election

Now that we think Russia hacks into our elections, many of us are upset.  Maybe it's time we looked at our voting system itself and its liabilities.  The idea of voting machine vulnerability has been around as long as voting machines, and other than a few voices in the wilderness, we've simply gone along with the program.

Sometime read Greg Palast's 2002 book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, if you haven't.  Among other things, it deals with the 2000 Florida election scams purging voter rolls and using Diebold machines.

Anybody remember this 2004 testimony by a computer programmer who says Republican Congressman Tom Feeney asked him to create a program to rig machines in Florida in 2000 to be able to change results, and explaining how to do it?

The programmer, Clint Curtis, says that one reason to suspect voting machine rigging is if the exit polls are very different from the election results, something that was true of Trump's victory.  And the excuse for that, which I thought was pretty darn lame at the time, was that people didn't want to admit they voted for Trump.  

Of course there are other problems with our system, including gerrymandered districts, super delegates, restrictive debate requirements, winner-take-all, and campaign finance. 

Maybe we're focusing too much on who's the candidate, and not paying enough attention to the system itself.  

Not maybe. 

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 8/27:

In a website published before r00tz Asylum, the youth section of Def Con, organizers indicated that students would attempt to hack exact duplicates of state election websites, referring to them as “replicas” or “exact clones.” (The language was scaled back after the conference to simply say “clones.”)

Instead, students were working with look-alikes created for the event that had vulnerabilities they were coached to find. Organizers provided them with cheat sheets, and adults walked the students through the challenges they would encounter.

  ProPublica

I hate it when people do this kind of shit. We really do have serious problems with our election systems, including the machines. Don't give people a way to dismiss that by phonying up something. Assholes.