Thanks to KM’s blogpost, I was alerted to the news that Hari Prasad, an engineer who worked to expose the vulnerabilities of the EVM has now been arrested. Despite Hari Prasad and his colleagues’ evidence of the vulnerabilities in the EVM, the Election Commission of India maintains that the EVMs are tamper proof. This despite evidence of rampant irregularities in the 2009 elections, and a growing concern about the security of EVMs worldwide.

J. Alex Halderman, Hari K. Prasad, and Rop Gonggrijp

I am inclined to suspect that the Election Commission and the political parties are all in collusion to ensure that elections are rigged and done so quietly. Why else would an engineer be arrested for actually speaking the truth?

In fact, the EVMs are so poorly designed that the data isn’t even encrypted in the memory! Come on, even I know to design an EVM better than that! This means anyone can tap into the machine and read/write/alter the votes. Worse, you can actually attach a look-alike piece of hardware to the EVMs to alter the votes remotely through a mobile phone [For details here's the full technical paper]. This looks more like a feature than a bug to me. It looks like this was a deliberate decision to make it easier to sell the election results to the highest bidder.

Welcome to India, a country whose democracy has been bought and paid for. Anyone trying to rock that boat will not be tolerated.

So yeah, when I saw those T-shirts, I knew they were Aggies and they were Republicans. As Obama was giving his acceptence speech we started hearing comments that went something like this:

He made it because the pussy liberals wanted to vote for a Muslim…

Looks like gold teeth and fried chicken will now be tax exempt…

We now have an Arab for a president. Looks like the terrorists won…

And I am not making any of this up! The Aggies are notorious for their racist views, hate, and bias anyway. Patrix’s post on Egg tossing at Obama (an incident which made it to the national news) should give you an idea of how antiquated (almost pre-integration) the Aggies’ ideology is. In fact, my earlier post about Aggie racism suggests an institutional investment in fostering such an environment.

In other news: Here’s what a (University of) Texas football player Buck Brunette had to say about Obama’s election “All the hunters gather up, we have a [nigger] in the White House.” That’s what he said on his Facebook page and was promptly kicked off the team.