Democratic Underground - Voting machines attached to telephone lines . . .

made it possible to meddle with the actual vote from miles away ---
without getting caught.

Naturally, in the vacuum of ethics and in the depths of ignorance about computerized voting, the opportunists arrived on the scene. It was already clear that IBM considered the business too dirty to mess with. Yet salesmen had placed the machines, along with service contracts and consulting fees, in thousands of America's precincts.

All over the nation the local election boards were taking delivery of Trojan horses that could be programmed to bide their time and then, when the proper moment came, to mistabulate election results on command. Computer experts with even the most vestigial imaginations figured out dozens of ways to compromise a vote, many of them so elegant that getting caught was almost impossible.

During a little-publicized court trial in West Virginia, it was revealed that there were ways to stop the computers during a count, while everyone watched. Simply fiddle with a few switches, turn the computer back on again, and thereby alter the entire vote, or parts of it. If anyone asked questions, the fixers could make any number of plausible excuses. Mostly all they had to say was "just checking that everything's running okay," and that was satisfactory.

With voting machines attached to telephone lines it was possible to meddle with the actual vote from a telephone miles away. Getting caught was not possible. "Deniability" and "untrackability" were built into the secret source codes that animated the machines.

It was possible to rig elections electronically in separate communities across the country, but until 1964 it was not considered possible to rig a national election. Then, in August 1964, News Election Service was created.

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