Let's go to the polls and….play PacMan?

by: Adam L

Tue Aug 24, 2010 at 01:30:00 AM EDT

It wasn't too long ago that the voting machines that we use here in New Jersey were shown to be very easily hackable. And it was even more recent that a court ruled that the mere fact that the Sequoia AVC Advantage machines were easy to hack didn't mean that they were hacked and therefore can still be used in elections (which reminds me of a great line from either Colbert or Stewart about how the "US would never torture" meant that "just because it is something that we DID do doesn't mean it is something that we WOULD do").

But I digress.

Courtesy of BoingBoing, the same Sequoia machines that were once easily hacked and shown to be hackable but still used in New Jersey were hacked to play Pac-Man as opposed to stealing votes (since that was already done in a prior demonstration).

While this is somewhat amusing on one level, there is a deeper issue here that I have been writing about for years, and one that Rep. Rush Holt has been all over - that of voting machine integrity. In fact, it was a little more than a week ago that our own Reps. Holt, Pallone, Rothman and 15 other Reps. urged Attorney General Eric Holder to take action IN ADVANCE OF THIS NOVEMBER'S ELECTIONS to make sure that votes are counted as cast.

This includes a basic paper trail and a manner in which the votes can be audited and verified, among other basic things. But the reality of this all is that in many many states, voters are still facing the same issues with respect to potentially stealing elections. Just because there was a big win in 2008 doesn't mean that the same vote theft and shenanigans that went on in 2000, 2002 and 2004 are gone. In fact, many other countries still use the same paper in a locked box as their means of voting - and they have the winner declared pretty damn quickly as well.

But I guess when the companies that make and run the voting machines for the overwhelming majority of the votes are major contributors to one of the political parties, that is integrity enough. We should just trust them, right? It's only one of the most basic rights and it's not like elections have consequences, right?

Adam L :: Let's go to the polls and….play PacMan?