election fraud in kentucky

This past Friday brought news of a handful of indictments of elections officials in Kentucky who are alleged to have rigged elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006 by changing votes in electronic voting machines. The group of five officials (plus one non-official) is charged with a list of crimes including manipulating the vote totals in electronic voting machines, certifying elections that they knew to be rigged, and arranging for votes to be sold. Remarkably, the vote manipulation technique here was essentially an exploit of a simple UI design flaw, and involved no computer skills at all on the part of the alleged perpetrators.

The accusation is that voting machines were set up with an extra a step: voters would select the candidates they wanted to vote for and press a big red "vote" button, which appeared to cast the vote, but then the voter was shown a confirmation screen where they had to press "confirm vote" on the screen to actually cast the vote. The indicted officials are alleged to have told voters the "vote" button was the final step so that voters would walk away leaving their vote uncompleted. The election worker would then go back and change the vote before pressing "confirm."

I'm sure if we try real hard, we can figure out a way that ACORN is behind this.

(actually Ars Technica says it appears to be a bipartisan conspiracy focused on personal enrichment rather than crooked party politics. But still, ACORN!)