More than that. I've already read of three separate instances where the electronic voting machines were recrding votes for democratic candidates instead of the candidates the voter actually wanted! One was in C(r)ook county (surprise!) where a candidate was trying to vote for himself and it went to his opponent!!
Another was in the Rockford area but I don't remember where the 3rd incident happened.
What should be boggling the public's mind is the fact that multiple independent teams of IT systems developers and security specialists solved the voter fraud issue, and quite definitively, back in the 1990s. We've been beating that drum ever since. Unfortunately, the politicians listen, but very few of them every actually do anything to implement what businesses widely accept as industry-standard best practices. This isn't about encryption, although that plays a key role in electronic voting systems. It goes way beyond that. It's about algorithms, the collection of procedures which, if followed, would prevent nearly all voter fraud in the first place, and detect any residual.
The amazing thing about the algorithms is they can just as easily be applied to a paper-only system, where all voting records are maintained for however many years is necessary to investigate any legitimate claims of voter fraud.
Every politician with whom I've had the opportunity to discuss this issue, however, is a lawyer, not a businessman. John (admin) is a rare exception to the rule that most lawyers are about as computer illiterate as the masses are legally illiterate. For example, in 2005, more than a decade after Word Perfect died a natural death everywhere else, it was still the mainstay throughout the legal world. I appreciate the fact they found the templates useful, but unfortunately, they didn't appreciate the fact that document-based "databases" had long since been eclipsed by actual databases.
Given this, when most politicians are lawyers, the political world gravitates towards attempting to solve problems by creating more laws, instead of using the proper tools. In the case of solving voter fraud, those tools are found in systems development, not another law.
By way of comparison, would you trust a painter who'd never turned a wrench to perform maintenance on your car?
Successful business managers employ experts in a variety of fields:
- Management
- Law
- Human Resource Management
- Leadership
- Accounting
- Finance
- Economics
- Research and Statistics
- Operations Management
- Marketing
- Strategic Planning
Law is only one of the many required areas of expertise needed to effectively and efficiently run a business, or, for that matter, a country. Some nations recognized this decades ago and their economies are doing exceptionally well. Politicians in the U.S. keep trying to solve most things by throwing either more legislation or more money at it, and neither approach is working. Even though the feds have departments in these fields, they rarely seem to use them when they create legislation. Most Congressmen use their gut, not their heads, and unfortunately, their guts are very heavily biased towards the legal profession, to the detriment of our nation as a whole.
Next election, keep this in mind. We need well-rounded businessmen at the helm, not more lawyers.
The bottom line: Had the politicians been a little smarter, we'd have online and kiosk electronic voting systems today, systems which allow
everyone, from individual voters on up, to verify the integrity of the system.