There’s an article that you can read here (found via Lex)that explains how any one person can steal a statewide election if certain electronic voting machines are used.  Luckily here in Forsyth County our Board of Elections said "nyet" to these machines and the director, who wanted the machines, quit in protest.  The bad news is that she’s now working in the state (NC) elections office.

As the author of the article says the average person will probably see warnings about possible election tampering to be alarmist or far-fetched, but I personally have a few reasons to believe it.  Among them:

• We’re talking politicians here.  I’d rather be surrounded by convicted felons than these folks since I’d at least know that the convicted felons were dumb enough to get caught.  These politicians are some of the smarter crooks out there.
• I spent a year or two managing the website for a non-profit with zero visibility.  For absolutely no reason other than having a little fun someone hacked the site and posted porn…twice.  If someone’s willing to hack merely for grins and giggles don’t you think there’s more than a few hackers who would consider hacking an election to be the ultimate in cool?
• These are computers.  Anyone who’s gotten the blue screen of death needs no further proof that things can go radically wrong.  Put another way, "Microsoft."

So yeah I’d say we’re screwed.