I'm suspicious by nature, particularly so where it appears that organized wealth, the media and politicians might be in bed together. With Rupert Murdoch and his alleged hackers called on the carpet, how about if investigators look into this suspicion of mine?
There were questions and suspicions raised about the electronic voting machines that appeared during the George W. Bush presidential years ... some of Bush's major donors like Diebold et al electronic voting machine manufacturers were " ... committed to helping Ohio (etc.) deliver its electoral votes to the President (Bush) ... " in 2004. Since none of these Diebold machines provided a paper receipt of the vote, suspicions arose that they could be hacked with no paper trail to verify vote-changes and election rigging.
In fact, critics of Diebold pointed out that virtually every other machine the company made provided a paper trail to verify the machine calculations and that " ... oddly, only the voting machines lacked this essential function." Further, Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy, Ariel J. Feldman and J. Alex Halderman, released a paper on Sep. 13, 2006 titled "Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine," which stated:
"Analysis of the [Diebold AccuVote-TS] machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities - a voting-machine virus."
Given Murdoch's support of Republicans, his (Fox News') hyping of the Iraq War and other Bush and right-wing agenda items, I don't think it's a stretch to suggest a look back at some of the elections of recent years ... elections that were closely contested and which relied on electronic voting machines to call the outcomes. I mean, in view of the current hacking allegations involving Mr. Murdoch, would it be that surprising to learn that there was a "Fox-in-the-hen-house" so-to-speak? Let's think outside the booth ... the voting booth that is.