Date: Friday, November 03, 2006 Expert: U.S. democracy at risk
Posted by Frank James at 7:30 am CST
Curtis Gans, an expert on voter participation in American elections, predicts that if nothing changes between now and Election Day, Democratic turnout should exceed that of Republicans in a mid-term election for the first time since 1990.
President Bush and the Iraq War get the credit for that, according to Gans.
But the larger picture portrayed by Gans, director of the American University Center for the Study of the American Electorate, in a new report doesn't offer much to cheer about. That's because voters who are turned off by both major parties are leaving them in a significant exodus.
Meanwhile, many other citizens just aren't voting at all, threatening the health of American democracy, Gans says.
With illegal immigration being a major issue for many voters, and not just conservatives, House Republicans badly wanted the fence legislation heading into the mid-term elections.
Diebold Election Systems Inc. issued a statement last night rebutting the Princeton University computer research team that said it found flaws with an electronic-voting machine made by the company.
The Princeton researchers said their examination of a Diebold AccuVote TS machine suggested that malicious software code could be introduced into a machine and allow someone to manipulate election results.
In its press release, the company explained why, in its view, such manipulation would be impossible.
"The unit has security software that was two generations old, and to our knowledge, is not used anywhere in the country," said Dave Byrd, president of Diebold Election Systems in a written statement.
"Normal security procedures were ignored," said Byrd. "Numbered security tape, 18 enclosure screws and numbered security tags were destroyed or missing so that the researchers could get inside the unit. A virus was introduced to a machine that is never attached to a network.”
A team of Princeton Universtity computer researchers say they've found serious vulnerabilities in an electronic-voting machine made by Diebold Co. which, according to the scientists, leaves the machine open to sabotage that could result in significant voting irregularities.
What's frightening is that most people wouldn't even know there were irregularities. A piece of malicious software code inserted into a Diebold AccuVote-TS machine by someone with "criminal" intent, could cause votes for one candidate to be wrongly attributed to another and do it in such a way that election officials would never detect it, the computer experts said.
