Virginia Drops Bad Voting Machines - UPDATED

Virginia Finally Bans "Worst Voting Machines in America"
I previously ranted about these crappy machines here where we had this cheery quote:

"If an election was held using the AVS WinVote, and it wasn’t hacked, it was only because no one tried. The vulnerabilities were so severe, and so trivial to exploit, that anyone with even a modicum of training could have succeeded."

It finally seems to have sunk in to the bureaucrats in Richmond that these voting machines were poorly designed, poorly built, and poorly implemented.

Really. Just read the report from the Virginia IT group who should have looked at the machines when they were first considered.

Problems ranged from wifi security being barely implemented to completely unpatched system software to hardwired and trivially easy-to-crack passwords.

The system was designed by idiots and sold by money grubbing marketers to idiots who bought the marketing hook-line-and-sinker.

Reading the report, I honestly can not imagine how to design a product less suited for something as critical as voting. Even a lowest bidder situation should have designed a better product.

I do not like to even think about how many elections were corrupted by this or similar systems... and we will never have confidence in any of the elections overseen by these boxes.

UPDATED - 19 Aug 2015
Shoup Voting Machines - the predecessor to the company that made the WinVote - has a very revealing article on Wikipedia.

It seems that Shoup had some run-ins with the law, in particular a fraud and bribery case in the 70s.

Of course, that was a long time ago...

via BoingBoing
also Wired

evoting

sroberts