News Copy, New York

McCain Spars With Obama Over Healthcare: Rematch Puts President On Defensive

Speaking of that healthcare summit, Obama and McCain had one particularly testy moment.

Looks as if John McCain got under Barack Obama's skin.

Not a warm fuzzy moment for President Obama.  The version news outlets are replaying has McCain at the end smiling like the cat who swallowed the canary.

Electronic Voting's Peril: Touch Screens Can Be Manipulated

20 states have electronic voting with touch screens that be maliciously calibrated to favor specific candidates, according to a Wired magazine blog article.

 This story has been out there for a long time.

"If one candidate has a check box in one place and a different candidate has it in a different place, you can set it up so that if you press on one candidate it gets recorded for another candidate," said Matt Blaze, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who led one of three teams that co-wrote the report (.pdf) last year. "But if you press on the other candidate, it gets recorded correctly for that candidate. You can make it work perfectly normally in most of the screen, but have it behave the way you want in small parts of it."

For those not familiar with Wired, it's a magazine that focuses on new technology and its contributors tend to be computer "geeks" who know how computers can be hacked into.

In other words, if Wired says that machines are vulnerable -- America is in for a slew of electronic complications today.

At issue are touchscreen machines manufactured by ES&S, 97,000 of which will be used today in 20 states, including counties in the crucial swing states of Ohio and Colorado.

As The Brad Blog has warned for several months, these companies have not been as diligent as they need to be -- and the election officials in many instances are close to clueless.

Wired explained -- in detail (it's a great article.  Please READ it) -- the process for calibrating the touchscreens allows poll workers or someone else to manipulate specific regions of the screen, so that a touch in one region is registered in another. "

"Someone attempting to rig an election could thus arrange for votes for one candidate to be mapped to the opponent."

The Brad Blog has listed some recent problems with electronic voting and it's alerts are updated regularly.

 

Tennessee Computer Voting Changes Republicans to Democrats

Houston, we have a problem ... with electronic voting.

The Brad Blog's newest story on voting by malfunction, this time in Tennessee with some notoriously unreliable machines.

In New York, Older Voting Machines Still Valid

 

New York has been slow to implement the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), sitting on most of the $220 million in Federal monies that was supposed to be spent on computerized voting machines.

HAVA, also known as the Hack America's Vote Act, has given lawmakers bureaucratic grief nationwide with computer crashes and fiendish technological fraud.

They just don't make those pokey clunky mechanical voting machines like they used to.

Devlin Barrett of The Associated Press had the following story on New York's ironic choice to so far keep the old voting machines.

Douglas Kellner, co-chair of the state's election board explained why New York still likes that old technology.

"Right now, there is not a single voting system on the market or in use anywhere in the country that meets current federal voting standards, and very few people realize it," he said. For the 2008 election, most New York voters will still use lever machines, and Kellner said he increasingly doubts new machines will be in place in time for the 2009 elections.

Those old machines are just fine.