"A shocking new report

puts Georgia in the spotlight for potential vote counting fraud,"

said Libertarian Party of Georgia Chairman Dr. Helmut Forren. "As

a 28 year veteran computer engineer, I knew these new voting machines

would be vulnerable to vote tampering, but it just floored me when I found

out how terribly vulnerable they really are," he continued.

Dr. Forren was referring to

two articles published by "Scoop", an Internet news-site, looking

at the details of the actual software used in Georgia to tally votes for

the 2002 election. The articles reveal that the security was so poor that

anyone with a simple Microsoft Office program and no real hacker ability

could change the vote totals ­ without detection. A real hacker could

have easily made a virus and placed it in the software before the election,

since the software was stored on the Internet without password protection

and was easily available worldwide. (The articles are at www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HS0307/S00065.htm

and www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HS0307/S00078.htm)

Georgia adopted the new system,

which uses touch screen computers at polling stations, statewide last

year, despite concern expressed by many in the computing industry about

the lack of a paper audit trail. "But this report shows that, even

with a paper audit trail, the underlying system for vote counting is completely

insecure. This system cannot stay in place if Georgians are every to trust

that their votes really count, or are counted correctly," said Forren.

"I was fascinated that

the investigator chose to focus on Cobb County," said Libertarian

Garrett Michael Hayes, who ran against Sonny Perdue and Roy Barnes for

Governor last year. "In fact, Cobb County took more than 800 votes

away from me over a month after the election. They explained it away as

'correcting an error.' But after reading these articles, I question that

­ especially because Cobb County made almost no public announcement

of the change. Maybe this is why they were so quiet! I'm not saying the

election was stolen from me, but I am asking, 'what other major security

mishaps or counting errors occurred that we were never told about?'"

The second article extensively

interviews a local technician working with 6,000 of the Georgia machines.

He describes three last-minute software updates applied to the machines,

at least one of which was downloaded from the insecure ftp site onto his

laptop that he shared with other technicians. About this update, the technician

says, "[He] said it did not affect the certification elements. So

it did not need to be certified." Libertarians wonder if a malicious

virus, in an uncertified software update, downloaded from an insecure

ftp site, publicly available on the World Wide Web, would care about the

certification rules?

"We are calling on the

Georgia Legislature to do the right thing and scrap this fraud-prone system

NOW. Concerned citizens can sign our online petition at www.404-Freedom.com,"

concluded Forren.