As usual, Mike is using misleading scare taglines and analysis to drum up interest. We should be applauding the election officials’ actions, not screeching about it. If you actually read the article Mike points to in his post, it’s clear that the reason the testing firm lost its certification is not that it failed to narrow its testing procedures, as Mike implies. The reason it lost it’s certification is that it was not following its (the laboratory’s) own quality controls and was not thoroughly testing the machines and not adequately documenting what they did test (so that the problems could be readily verified, identified and fixed):

Federal election officials found that Ciber (the testing firm) “was not following its (Ciber’s) quality-control procedures and could not document that it was conducting all the required tests…Experts say the deficiencies of the laboratory suggest that crucial features like the vote-counting software and security against hacking may not have been thoroughly tested on many machines now in use.”

Here’s a link to the original source article in the NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/04/washington/04voting.html?ei=5090&en=584c62f92a3b93b5&ex=1325566800&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1186143425-o4IM/GchP9LcW4ZKIDFveg

Mike’s so desperate for readers that he’s willing to post misleading analysis to drum up his readership numbers at the expense of actually keeping pressure on election officials to make sure the e-voting machines are actually thoroughly tested. Pretty pathetic.

The adoption of electronic voting machines has been corrupted by bought politicians from the beginning.

Just one example: The manufacturers refused access to their programming source code to anyone including independent, non-partisan inspectors such as universities. They claimed it was to protect their trade secrets.

Compared against our right to vote in an honest and fair election, their trade secrets are not as important. The inspections could be done in a manner to protect their code.

And the state governments allowed them to get away with it.

The so-called “rights” of corporations trumped democracy again.

Watch the TV documentary – Nova or Frontline, I believe – on the subject.

PS – The so called rights of corporations to be treated as though they are citizens is based on a misreading of a single judge’s opinion in a single case.

Excerpt from:
Now Corporations Claim The “Right To Lie” by Thom Hartmann

In the 1886 Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state tax assessor, not the county assessor, had the right to determine the taxable value of fenceposts along the railroad’s right-of-way.
However, in writing up the case’s headnote – a commentary that has no precedential status – the Court’s reporter, a former railroad president named J.C. Bancroft Davis, opened the headnote with the sentence: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Oddly, the court had ruled no such thing. As a handwritten note from Chief Justice Waite to reporter Davis that now is held in the National Archives said: “we avoided meeting the Constitutional question in the decision.” And nowhere in the decision itself does the Court say corporations are persons.
Nonetheless, corporate attorneys picked up the language of Davis’s headnote and began to quote it like a mantra.
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Google it – read it. It’s very important to us all.