Mareseatoatsanddoeseatoatsbutlittlelambseativy.

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

How to program a voting machine

It's hiding in plain site. Anyone who knows cntrl-alt-del should grasp the concept: you touch the screen simultaneously in some specific spots and it goes into control mode or whatever the hell you want to. Heck, we've done that on web pages: you make a single pixel on the screen live, off in some corner, invisible, but active: you click when you find it and voila! you're in control mode of your pages.
That technique has been applied to tablets that support very complex custom overlays... you tell the table what the overlay is by touching the specific marks on the overlay. For instance, you can tell the machine that the overlay is a map of the United States.
The process was quite accidentally demonstrated, in fact, that such a process is already in the Diebold machines: on 60 minutes, it was demonstrated that if you voted for two candidates at the same time, the first and the third at one time, neither was chosen, but the one in the middle was selected.
Another voter said no matter how many time she picked on candidate, the x showed up for another: calibration? nope, but surely that would work easily... all you have to do is shrink one field and enlarge another... encourage a mistake.
The very fact that the software for the voting machines was given to a private company and that code is proprietary is in itself intentional abrogation of responsibility.
So, my prediction is out there: violence, police, national guard, deaths, and Bush stays in office siting domestic unrest as terrorism, and the supreme court will back him.

1 comment:

gberke said...

When there is a powerful opportunity, it is never a question of IF it will be taken, it is only when. Never.
That is why a prudent man takes his keys out of his car when he parks it in a very public place. That's just one car, so the "when" might just not intersect the "if" space.
But put a couple of million cars out there with keys in them, and "when" is "now".
Thus, the voting machine. Votes are being stolen now. That's not gloom and doom. That's just physics, biology, life.