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a.

Why isn’t the mainstream media paying more attention to this story?

Black Box Voting alleges tampering of voting machines; “approximatley 100,000 errors”

Obviously, this is a group with an agenda. They claim they’re sure they’re looking at live data rather than test data, but it seems possible to me that they are misinterpreting the data.

But I think they’ve demonstrated that steps ought to be taken to validate their findings. I’m thinking steps as in “indepedent commission appointed to investigate the matter further.”

My agenda is to ensure that there’s accountability and transparency in voting systems. Even if the Florida election were overturned, it wouldn’t change the fact that half of the voters didn’t get the candidate they wanted. It wouldn’t change the fact that awarding all of the a states electoral college votes to a candidate with a razor-thin majority is an anachronism. The issue here is how difficult the voting machines make it to determine whether or not there was fraudulent activity.

I helped develop training on what’s called “Audit Trail Device Security” a couple of years back. Any modern fuel pump or supermarket scale records all calibration changes that were made to it. If a gas station could sell 99% of a gallon for the price of a full gallon they’d make a lot of extra money over the course of a year, so accuracy is a big deal. The systems are designed so that gas station owners can’t set the pump to deliver a true gallon right before the federal inspectors come around, and switch it back when they leave.

It seems absolutely insane to me that a bid was awarded to a company — let alone a company that’s allegedly strongly partisan — that apparently proposed to build less accountability into their voting machines than goes into any gas pump or meat scale.

b.

This is for my pal Paula:

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