Florida Voting Machines

I wonder if anyone pays attention. If not, then Jay Leno and David Letterman will have plenty of comedy material.

The state recommended Friday that elections officials across Florida enhance security safeguards for all voting systems after tests in California and Tallahassee exposed weaknesses.

Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho called the technical advisory a vindication of his findings last year that some Diebold optical-scan voting machines can be hacked by election office insiders to change results.

Voting machine records disappeared in Miami-Dade County. The date was July 27, 2004.

The records disappeared after two computer system crashes last year, county elections officials said, leaving no audit trail for the 2002 gubernatorial primary. A citizens group uncovered the loss this month after requesting all audit data from that election.

A county official said a new backup system would prevent electronic voting data from being lost in the future. But members of the citizens group, the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, said the malfunction underscored the vulnerability of electronic voting records and wiped out data that might have shed light on what problems, if any, still existed with touch-screen machines here. The group supplied the results of its request to The New York Times.

Read the whole New York Times article. It shows how whack Florida's voting machines still were after 2000. Florida has a history of dead people voting. Now that's commitment!