Secretary of State Uncle Tom Blackwell would like to thank you for your vote.
Nevermind that you thought you voted for the other white guy. Thanks to the latest advancements in modern vote-rigging technology from Diebold, you might as well have voted for a talking Whopper meal for attorney general, or so Betty Montgomery hopes.
A recent study by Princeton researchers found that Diebold memory cards could be hacked easier than your friend's MySpace page. And just one virus-infected card could spread to every machine it's connected with, causing a chain reaction.
So many were legitimately concerned when it was discovered recently that, months before this year's primary election, a mysterious shipment of 32 memory cards for absentee ballot scanning machines arrived at Secretary of State Uncle Tom Blackwell's office.
Blackwell's office is mum on why the cards, bound for Lucas, Montgomery, and other counties around Ohio, got mailed to him, and not directly to the county elections boards, as is normally done. But the memory cards sat in Blackwell's office a whole month before getting shipped out, according to recently released e-mails between the Secretary of State's office and Diebold.
"One infected memory card could infect all these machines, and no one would know it," says state Senator Teresa Fedor, whose Lucas County district received most of the sketchy cards. "Anyone's capable, if they have a motive, and they want to."
Is Uncle Tom capable? If you're not sucking crack-smoke out the end of a light bulb, the answer is probably yes.
"He's the most partisan secretary of state in the nation," says Fedor. "Is anyone in America surprised?"
--Jared Klaus
