Emphasis Added

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

The Right to Vote Right

Several weeks ago, a piece posted here about the problems of electronic voting ("Bedtime for Democracy" October 14, 2003). drew enormous comment, the most pertinent of which centered on the credibility of the critics. Today, MediaWhoresOnline posts an excellent account of one citizen's attempt to get to the bottom of electronic voting questions in Georgia (scroll down to "Action Alert: Touch Screen Voting"). This is not a partisan screed: those most directly implicated are the Democratic Secretary of State Cathy Cox and a bunch of worthless journalistic hacks at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It is worth reading through-and-through, but especially relevant to the previous conversation is this bit:

Both Maryland and Ohio are currently looking at buying DRE voting machines from Diebold. In light of the Johns-Hopkins/Rice report, Maryland hired the defense contractor SAIC to do their own study. SAIC concluded that there were literally hundreds of security concerns, including several dozen they deemed "serious".

This isn't some community college computer science teacher here. This is a company specializing in secure telecommunications technology. And here's what they said:

This Risk Assessment has identified several high-risk vulnerabilities in the implementation of the managerial, operational, and technical controls for AccuVote-TS voting system. If these vulnerabilities are exploited, significant impact could occur on the accuracy, integrity, and availability of election results. In addition, successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could also damage the reputation and interests of the SBE and the LBEs. This Risk Assessment also identified numerous vulnerabilities with a risk rating of medium and low that may have an impact upon AccuVote-TS voting if exploited. [emphasis added]

Please continue the excellent discussion, now that we can dispense with the questions about the credibility of the critics.

12:16:42 PM

Emphasize This! []

Impartial

Thanks to the brave legislators in Congress, the scourge of partial-birth abortion will soon be banned from the land. No different in effect from any other sort of abortion, the high "ick" factor of this procedure seems to be the sole reason that it has worked so well as a wedge issue for the foetus-fascists on the Right. Apparently, one of the reasons this seldom-performed type of abortion is performed is if the pregnancy somehow threatens the future fertility of the woman (or, in some cases, perhaps her life). This consideration and its consequences, however, are deemed to be trivial in the face of the value of the life of the "unborn child."

I wonder how much support a "partial birth abortion ban" would have if it were necessary for some reason to remove the penis of the child's father if the pregnancy went wrong and the child were carried to term?

9:13:40 AM

Emphasize This! []