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At last, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times seem to be slightly comprehending the horrors of e-voting. Granted that mainstream corporate papers are usually willfully ignorant on the great issues of the day, but their glacial pace in reporting on e-voting problems ranks as one of their all-time blunders. Nevertheless, WSJ ran the following kicker: “Some former backers of technology seek return to paper ballots, citing glitches, fraud fears.” They could have run that story last year, after the bipartisan commission on federal election reform, co-chaired by President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, noted in no uncertain terms that: “Software can be modified maliciously before being installed into individual voting machines. There is no reason to trust insiders in the election industry any more than in other industries.” Indeed. There’s every reason to trust them less than anybody else, because of the unprecedented power and money involved in U.S. politics.

With the recent e-voting primary meltdowns in Texas, Illinois and Ohio, even the most ardent attackers of e-voting critics are finally getting the message. Remember that the New York Times originally, without any facts, denounced as a as a “conspiracy theorist” anyone suggesting that voting fraud was a possibility. Today, they were forced to quote Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Michael I. Shamos, stating that the Diebold touchscreen voting machines had “the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system.” University of Iowa professor Douglas Jones, also a computer scientist, told the Times, “This is the barn door being wide open while people were arguing over the lock on the front door.”

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