The story is out about the possible theft or loss of "smart cards" from a Shelby County (Memphis) early voting site. The AP is not identifying the place or amount of cards, but Drudge is. For those unaware, these are the cards a voter is given to take to the machine so the machine can record their vote.
The Shelby County Election Commission says there is no problem, but WREC-AM radio host Mike Fleming just spoke with an expert about these cards, who says the cards have about 7 kb of memory and little if any protection from hacking. "If you bring me 12 of these cards within a day I could have 120 that could be spread across the country" said Colin Hendricks of Smart Metrics. Funniest line of the interview, Hendricks: "these cards are only as smart as the people using them". Fleming: "well, then we've got nothing to worry about down here in Memphis".
This is one of my several concerns about early voting. One, it's bound to create more opportunities for cheating, and two, if one of the candidates does something grotesquely stupid between the time a person votes and the actual election day there's no way to change the vote.
One more thing. As Fleming mentioned today, and as others have previously, John Harvey was the person that uncovered the dead voters in the Ophelia Ford/Terry Roland special election last year and stopped the stealing of an election--for real. For the sake of ALL our votes, democrat, republican and otherwise, we need better oversight, which includes appointing Mr. Harvey to the Election Commission on April 2, 2007.
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