Exit polls are used when we try to verify the authenticity of elections in third world contries. It is very possible that the exit polls were wrong but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't question the methodology. Either the exit polls were wrong because of early voting and other reasons or the voting system is wrong. If people could have access to the exit polling data this issue could be decided. The article states specifically, when comparing the entire state only counties that use a specific type of electronic voting method by Diebold were statistically off. The article also mentions how one could tamper with such a system by opening the database record into MS Excel and copy and pasting the results around. Basically there is no way to verify that the votes have been changed unless such provisions are enabled into the software. It is like when we were running Windows 98 from home through a VPN but each computer was directly connected to the internet. We upgraded to Windows 2000 and suddenly saw a huge list of break-in attempts from the same computers in the same situation. I had to explain that Windows 2000 didn' t make us less secure it just informed us of our vulnerability. Now we have firewalls on each computer and continue to monitor the security logs. When I started working with Linux, I was very happy to see that Linux has a lot more information in the logs than Windows ever did. If the information is not recorded, you cannot get that information after-the-fact, you needed that information recorded before you had the error. -- Jeff Rasmussen GPG public key 0x9686C12F _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list