- SEATTLE -- The electronic
voting system designed for the forthcoming American election is fundamentally
flawed and could undermine the trustworthines of the entire US democratic
process, a scientist has told the annual meeting of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science.
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- Paper ballots can be scrutinised to ensure they have
not been misread or tampered with but electronic votes recorded only as
computer code cannot be checked to see the true intention of the voter,
said David Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford University in
California.
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- One in four voters in the US presidential election in
November will use touch-sensitive machines rather than putting a cross
on a ballot paper.
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- "The system is in crisis. A quarter of the American
public are voting on machines where there's very little protection of their
votes. I don't think there's any reason to trust these machines,"
he said.
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- Such a system is even vulnerable to fraud byemployees
of the machine's manufacturers, who could rewrite the software to rig an
election he said.
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- "It is technically not difficult to do if you bribe
a programmer at a major manufacturer. If you ask how likely it is that
it could be done, the answer is 100 per cent. If you ask how likely it
is to be done, I can't answer that," he added.
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=491730
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