Cal Univ. student sentenced for Election Tampering. Found on MSNBC! [View All]

Oct. 16, 2003 / 12:15 PM ET

A VOTING SCANDAL?

There’s the possibility of an enormous scandal brewing with the GOP using voter technology stealing votes.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=452972
I can’t tell if they’re doing it yet or just getting ready to do it-or to be able to do it if they need to. And don’t tell me they’re above that kind of thing. If these guys cared about honest elections, I’d be whining about President Gore in this space. Anyway, read the extremely disturbing story above. Then read this one.
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,60563,00.html

Why, for goodness sakes is the mass media avoiding this potentially enormous story?

Meanwhile, you probably can’t read this one-since it’s in the Chronicle of Higher Education-a publication not only requires a paid subscription but also libeled me recently-but it is rather amazing.

Here’s a summary: It seems “a graduate student at the University of California at Riverside has been sentenced to spend 28 days in jail on consecutive weekends for tampering with a campus election conducted over the Internet. The student, Shawn Bijan Nematbakhsh, 21, had been charged with unauthorized alteration of computer data, a felony under California’s criminal code. Mr. Nematbakhsh pleaded guilty to a similar misdemeanor charge and was sentenced last week in Riverside County Superior Court. In April, while he was still an undergraduate, Mr. Nematbakhsh used the campus’s Internet voting system to cast 801 votes in a student-government election for “American Ninja.”

He later described the move as a senior prank intended to expose how easily elections could be rigged because of security flaws in the system. Critics of computerized voting, especially Internet voting, defended Mr. Nematbakhsh’s actions. ‘This Riverside student may be the first person in the history of the United States to go to jail for hacking an election in an effort to show the weaknesses of computerized voting,” according to a source. Here’s the restricted link.
http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2003/09/2003090501t.htm