From UMN.Com
How to: Do Election Fraud, Steal Elections or Fix a Vote
Part 1 Motivation and Actors

I started this article thinking that "fixing" elections would be about how automated voting machines lend themselves to many ways of fraud. And there are lots of ways they do. But as I began to think about election fixing, I found that I had a whomping big list of strategic and tactical methods of election manipulation and I did not even get to the actual vote mechanics yet. Election fraud is not just stuffing the ballot box. How to do vote fraud and election manipulation is part 2. A real life example of holes in optical scanner voting is described in Ramsey County Minnesota Public Elections Test.

Voting is a whole process that has many opportunities to manipulate the outcome. The closer the voting results are, the more the opportunity that a subtle manipulation can swing the vote one way or the other. To frame my analysis of security in the voting process I will use techniques described by such security analysts as Bruce Schneier in his book "Secrets and Lies." more

From Brad Blog:
The Pennsylvania Primary: Democracy of the Gods. Tuesday's Election Will be 'Unrecountable, Unverifiable, and Unauditable'...
On Tuesday night, you will be told who the winner of the Pennsylvania Primary is. You will accept it. You will have no choice. No matter who the winner really is. Or isn't.

This Tuesday's crucial contest will be primarily run on 100% faith-based, Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen or push-button) e-voting machines across the state. There will be no way to determine after the election whether the computers have accurately recorded, or not, the intent of those voters who voted on them. As VerifiedVoting.org summarizes the crucial contest, it "will be essentially unrecountable, unverifiable, and unauditable."

Most of the votes, more than 85%, will be cast on such DRE systems which do not provide so-called "Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails" (VVPATs), as their use has been found unconstitutional in the state, since its been determined, accurately, that ballot secrecy cannot be guaranteed when using such paper trail systems. Not that it matters.

With or without a so-called "paper trail" printer, all touch-screen/push-button/DRE voting machines are equally unverifiable and antithetical to American democracy. Period.

So, as with South Carolina's primary, so so long ago, and other states since, whatever the officials tell you at the end of the election is what you, and we, will have to accept. Whether votes are counted accurately is completely out of anyone's hands at this point. It's strictly Democracy of the Gods... read the rest

Voting safeguards measure fails in House
That's right. Our House of Representatives voted AGAINST safeguarding YOUR VOTE. EVERYONE in the House knows the system NEEDS to be RIGGED and is a fundamental infrastructure within the election process. The SUPERFICIAL words spoken by our 'elected' officials are only given to appease the most naive constituency (which turns out to be 95% of us). read more

BLOGGED BY Brad Friedman ON 4/11/2008 3:29PM
Computer Scientists: '2008 U.S. Presidential Election Can Be Hacked'
Systems Made by Diebold, Sequoia and Hart InterCivic Are 'Still Going to Have Same Viral Vulnerabilities Found' During California's 2007 Study...

A bunch of world-class computer scientists testified publicly this week that "U.S. Presidential Election Can Be Hacked".

As stunning as that sounds, there's nothing new here necessarily to readers of The BRAD BLOG, other than the fact that outlets like the IDG News Service and PCWorld are reporting it --- out loud --- and that the computer scientist community, specifically those who have been studying these systems, are now out and out saying it --- in public...and out loud.

"The three systems we looked at are three of the most widely used around the nation," warned professor David Wagner of the University of California, "They're going to be using them in the 2008 elections; they're still going to have the same vulnerabilities we found."

Wagner was speaking about e-voting system made by Diebold, Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic which he examined during CA Sec. of State Debra Bowen's independent "Top to Bottom" review last year. He "and his team found that they could introduce a computer virus to any of the three systems, which would then spread throughout the county and ultimately skew the vote count," the IDG News Service reports.

While our readers may be familiar with the above, our friend "DHinMI" and his fellow misinformed DailyKos front pagers may want to give this short article a quick look sometime soon. Particularly the part about paper ballots, and that simply having them is not enough...if nobody bothers to actually count them.

full story here

How to 'wash' a hard ballot read

Reccount Problems in New Hampshire