Good post MsM. I actually gave my government class a lecture about the new electronic voting machines. Now, the diebold machine code is easily available and has been reviewed many times through government audit. I don't want people saying that the government audits done on the machine code are 'rigged' simply because the govt did them. They were done by auditing groups who have no real political lean, they do their job, i trust them for the most part. There have been some other audits of the code by independent groups that gave it less than stellar ratings. Aside from that, there are blatant security problems with the transmission of votes.

After polling takes place at your precinct polling center, the diebold machines have to get their votes to the central vote server for the area. There are two options: A) Remove hard drives from the machine, deliver them by van to the central vote server site, and upload the voting data directly. B) Establish a direct dial-in connection with the central vote server, remotely log in, and send the votes _unencrypted_ over the phone line. Now, here's the hilarious part, there's basically no authentication at all. So, joe evil dude can go hack apart the TNI box of the building the machine is in, intercept the number the machine is calling, and then act like the central vote server and record the votes that come in. So, after this happens, joe evil dude changes the votes to his liking and replays what happened and directs that to the central vote server.

Hrm....sounding feasible yet? "But somebody must notice the vast statistical difference between the hacked votes and the regulap ballots, right?" Well, no. Bruce Schneier had a very good post about this at: http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0404.html It seems rather simple to steal an election without anybody knowing it happened.

Personally, I'm surprised that they announced the winner without ever auditing the voting machine results, checking the local machine backups against the votes reported by the central voting servers, etc. There's a group called BlackBoxVoting that's trying to get audit logs of many sites that offered electronic voting under the FOIA. More information can be found at: http://blackboxvoting.org/