There’s an incredibly ill-informed editorial running today in the Washington Times written by John Lott Jr. which is attempting to mislead the public about the current debate on electronic voting.

Mr. Lott attempts to make the point that e-voting machines can’t be hacked because they aren’t connected to the internet. The funny thing about the world we live in is that a forty year old might buy that argument, but an eight year old would know this guy doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about.

Here’s the paragraph in question:

Yet, these horror stories have one major problem: None of the electronic voting machines is hooked up to the Internet. The machines are stand-alone units. It would be like someone trying to hack into your computer while it wasn’t hooked up to the Internet. Impossible.

There it is- hacking is impossible if the computer is not connected to the internet. Tell that to all the hackers in the eighties.

I guess Mr. Lott’s reasoning is that there’s no other way for “hackers” (he’s probably actually referring to crackers) to interact with the voting machines. I guess he forgot that people use the machines to vote.

The cracking of a voting machine wouldn’t likely be a remote attack. Someone with ill-intent can carry in a specially coded card which could add or subtract votes from either side. The scary part? Imagine a world where the maker of the machines has a specific political affiliation. Oh, wait… that’s Diebold, isn’t it? So, if a company were interested in influencing the outcome of elections and delivering electoral votes to the president, one could simply create E-Voting machines without an audit trail. Oh, wait- that’s also happening with Diebold, isn’t it? So if a company were… ambitious enough, they might be able to add a few votes here, subtract a few there and never be detected. That would be incredibly easy for a trusted Diebold employee to do.

Call it a conspiracy theory- that’s fine, but rigging an election shouldn’t be as easy as I just laid out above.

It’s sad that counting all the votes is becoming a political issue, with the right wing against protections and backup systems like audit trails and paper receipts. At this point can we really call it a coincidence that previous E-Voting problems have ended up favoring Republican candidates?

Ask yourself, why would these companies make voting machines less secure with your vote than an ATM is with your money?

link to John Lott Jr.’s editorial.