More news on the dangers of electronic voting:

THE UK Independent takes a closer look at the Georgia state elections. These were the first elections to use the new voting machines. Pollsters, analysts and voters alike were shocked when the results registered a totally unexpected 16 point swing to the Republicans.

Wired picks up the story. A former employee of Diebold, the company that makes the machines, claims that the company installed patches on its machines before the state's 2002 gubernatorial election that were never certified by independent testing authorities or cleared with Georgia election officials.

"Right now you can open GEMS' .mdb file with MS-Access, and alter its contents. That includes the audit log," wrote Ken Clark, an employee of Diebold Election Systems, in an October 2001 e-mail.

That's right, the underlying software is based on Microsoft Access. Hello?!?! Security? Microsoft? Nobody in the IT world would seriously trust any MS-based product to handle such a critical security product.

Diebold has now taken legal action to close down BlackBoxVoting.com, a website that campaigns to expose the inherent dangers of electronic voting. It's the third time Diebold has pressured the website to close down, each time citing email spam as the reason. You can still read about BlackBoxVoting.com at this link:

http://www.talion.com/blackboxvoting.org.htm