Rebecca found this news story and forwarded it to comp.risks.
Here, the current state of electronic voting is described, and it sounds a little too close to a Science Fiction / Spy novel for my taste:
As far as we know, some guy from Russia could be controlling the outcome of computerized elections in the United States.It's one thing when Papa Joe buys the US Presidency for his son. It's another thing entirely when the government institutionalizes the kind of corruption that would make even Papa Joe blush.In fact, Vikant Corp., a Chicago-area company owned by Alex Kantarovich, formerly of Minsk, Belorussia (also known as White Russia, formerly U.S.S.R.), supplies the all-important 'control cards' to Election Systems & Software (ES&S), the world's largest election management company, writes reporter Christopher Bollyn. According to ES&S, they have "handled more than 40,000 of the world's most important events and elections. ES&S systems have counted approximately 60% of the U.S. national vote for the past four presidential elections. In the U.S. 2000 general election, ES&S systems counted over 100 million ballots."
Getting back to Kantarovich, he would not disclose where the control cards are made, except they aren't made in America, writes Bollyn. Nor would he discuss his previous employment. Bollyn says he got some not-too-thinly-veiled threats from Kantarovich.
[...]
That's just great. Now, we could possibly have both the Russian mafia and the U.S. mafia involved in our elections.
FWIW, I've spent my voting life in Philadelphia and New York City, where mechanical voting machines are the norm. Each tick of the lever turns an odometer at the back of the machine, which is read at the end of the evening. (The gears are a little tricky, to allow common voting patterns: "vote for one candidate for Mayor" and "vot for three of these nine candidates for Municipal District Judge".) Someone of a mechanical engineering bent can examine the gears to verify that there's a 1:1 correspondance between ticks of the lever and ticks of the odometer.
