By Brad Friedman on 3/28/2012, 12:01am PT  

From The Gazette in Montreal...

OTTAWA — A large-scale cyber-attack involving more than 10,000 computers was responsible for the online polling problems during Saturday's NDP leadership vote, according to Scytl Canada, the company contracted by the party to conduct the vote.

While the attack in no way compromised the sanctity of the vote — in other words, no ballots cast by bona fide NDP members were added, subtracted or changed — Scytl indicated in a statement Tuesday that the attack was an attempt to crash or slow down websites by "saturating servers with bogus external communications requests that deny legitimate users access" — otherwise known as a distributed denial of service attack.

And we know the attack by 10,000 computers "in no way compromised the sanctity of the vote" how, exactly? Well, because they say so, silly!

We know Scytl's elections are secure because, as we noted in January when the Spanish-based company purchased S.O.E., the largest "election management company" in the U.S. (they do online results reporting, etc.), they told us so in their own press release announcing the acquisition. And they told us twice! They couldn't tell us they were secure unless they really were! Am I right, Sequoia Voting Systems?

Other than that --- oh, and other than this --- voting by Internet is a great idea! Am I right, Americans Elect and Michael Eisner?

The Gazette also goes on to note at the end of their coverage:

While voter turnout was low — only about half the NDP's 131,000 members voted in advance, online or from the convention floor — officials have insisted it wasn't related to the slowdown.

Oh, well, if officials insisted, then certainly they must be right about that.

"Democracy by Internet: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?" TM

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Article Categories: Election Irregularities, Internet Voting, Election 2012, Canada, SCYTL