Voting from home, over the internet. That’s the dream. It’s when the vast majority of people will finally vote. Hell, even I might register to vote if you could online. But this year, fittingly in the election that the internet has mattered more than ever before, we’re taking a solid (baby) step in that direction. Starting Friday, a pilot program will let about 700 U.S. citizens in Germany, Japan and the UK vote over the internet using hardened PCs.
Even though the great state of West Virginia is only at threat level orange for having the closest thing the average American has to a voice tampered with, in at least three counties, voters have complained that when they tried to vote for Barack Obama, the touchscreen voting machine cast their vote for John McCain. One voter reported that all of their Democratic votes, for every level of government, were magically transformed into real American Republican ones.
With the election coming up in a mere two weeks, our friends over at Dvice decided to take a very in depth look at the technology behind all of the states voting machines and just how susceptible they are to both malicious hacking and human error. What results is a beautiful interactive map showing the different machines used in each state and a rundown of every type of voting machine used in the entire country. You’ll definitely want to spend some time playing around with this and then worrying about how the election is going to be hijacked by a combination of hackers and bumbling old people in Florida (again). [Dvice]
Conspiracy theorist or not, any time I’m typing information into a computer at any time of the day, I know that it can be lost at a moment’s notice, by the simple glitch of a program or power supply. There’s simply no permanence to digital information, which makes the potential alteration of such data both frightening and perfectly realistic. Apply that principle to something like a presidential election, and the prospects become downright scary. That is, unless you’re Homer Simpson. Then it’s just kind of funny. [via Wonkette - Thanks Diebold!]
