Meet the e-voting machine so easy to hack, it will take your breath away

[cprise]

57. A mechanical hole-puncher is a billion times more transparent

than what occurs inside the logic gates of a computer. Plenty of people with technical inclination can analyze a lever-operated voting machine down to the last 'bit' or decision the machine is capable of expressing.

If you think Virginia's system is so awful, imagine what their corrupt officials think of paper ballots.

As long as a system has standardized on electronic ballots, regardless of whether some exceptions are made for paper, it is open to being skewed using methods that even the vast majority of computing professionals could not detect. The state of computer security is in tatters.

The IT industry cannot even get its own act together in protecting normal transactions; anonymous transactions are beyond their ability partly because the kind of system architecture that has been popularized is designed with a general disregard for security. That checkmark you see next to a name on an LCD screen is a reflection of a reflection that is handled by many different layers of abstraction within that diminutive-looking device.

Deluded fools can bandy about charges of "conspiracy theorist" and "cynic", and give heartening reassurances that security guards are present when trying to defend the inevitability of technical "progress" by microchip. But it seems to me they are the least prepared to debate the issue on technical grounds.