Mom, Can My Voting Machine Spend the Night? - The Lede - Breaking News - New York Times Blog: "Ohio is an election battleground state with perennial problems at the polls. So what have election officials in some precincts of the state been doing to keep their voting machines safe from tampering?
Taking the machines home with them and stashing them in their garages in the days before a big election.
If it sounds like something pulled straight out of an episode of Saturday Night Live, or Borat for that matter, it’s not. The practice has become so widespread that it even has a nickname, “sleepovers.”"
Appalled? Stunned? Amazed at the sheer amazing witless stupidity? Wait, it gets better!
Look, any even vaguely credible review of the validity of electoral procedures would say that this completely invalidates the election itself. If this is not actually illegal, it ought to be, and it should be grounds for an immediate push to overhaul the procedures and fire anyone corrupt and or stupid enough to actually think this is defensible.
Many local election officials who defend the “sleepover” practice say it makes it easier for them to transport the machines to polling sites, and that it allows them to keep an eye on the machines. But their critics call that nonsense, and argue that allowing people to take voting machines home with them — where they can access them at any time, and potentially hack into them — is the very definition of a security risk.
Not to put too fine a point on it, any candidate that supposedly wins under these conditions will never be trusted by anyone. If Obama does win, everyone will have to assume he's a Trojan horse candidate. If McCain wins, everyone will refer to it as a "selection victory."
We have barely enough time for the states to return to good old fashioned paper ballots - which may sound expensive, but if the alternate is the collapse of confidence in government, it would be cheap at any price.
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