The Washington Post reports that some three million donors made a total of 6.5 million online donations to the campaign. The average online donation was $80, and the average donor gave more than once.

“You looked at the money being raised online in the same way that you looked at the crowds who came to the rallies,” Joe Rospars, the director of Obama’s new media department, told the Post. “You were constantly surprised at the number of people who were coming out to see him, [and when it came to online donations] people exceeded our expectations as to what they were willing to do.”

Astonishing. Seems a comprehensive online presence–one that spans microblogs, social networks and video sites–really does have its benefits, when it comes to political campaigns…important ones, anyway.

A man who reportedly believed Republicans were conspiring to steal today’s election entered an Allentown polling site, signed in and proceeded to smash the screen of one of the electronic voting machines with a metal cat paperweight, poll volunteers said.

‘He smashed it with the cat’s ears,’ said volunteer Jim Govostis.”

–Morning Call, Nov. 7, 2006

Fantastic. Here we are, just two weeks before the 2008 presidential election and the integrity and accuracy of some of the electronic voting machines that will determine its outcome are in question.

Again.

According to new research from the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy, the Sequoia AVC Advantage machines used throughout New Jersey and Louisiana, and in a few counties in Colorado, Virginia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania as well, can be hacked in eight minutes to manipulate vote tallies.

From the Princeton report:

The AVC Advantage contains a computer. If someone installs a different computer program for that computer to run, it can deliberately add up the votes wrong. It’s easy to make a computer program that steals votes from one party’s candidates, and gives them to another, while taking care to make the total number of votes come out right. It’s easy to make this program take care to cheat only on election day when hundreds of ballots are cast, and not cheat when the machine is being tested for accuracy. This kind of fraudulent computer program can modify every electronic ‘audit trail’ in the computer. Without voter-verified paper ballots, it’s extremely hard to know whether a voting machine (such as the AVC Advantage) is running the right program.”

Damning allegations and ones which Sequoia categorically denied after unsuccessfully attempting to suppress them. According to Sequoia, its voting machines are vulnerable only in a classroom setting. In real-life election scenarios, they’re just fine. “…Simple, established, and previously used accuracy and security protections–removed from the Advantages studied in the report published by the plaintiffs–make the items in their report next to impossible,” Sequoia said in rebuttal to Princeton researchers’ claims. “In fact, many of the scenarios painted by plaintiffs depend on the existence of crooked, malicious, and corrupt pollworkers, while the success of some scenarios depends on both corrupt pollworkers and inattentive voters.”

How reassuring.

Well, at least they’re not switching votes between candidates like some of those touchscreen systems in West Virginia, right?

PREVIOUSLY:

• Got a “Verifiable Paper Trail” for Those Phantom Voters?
• Premier Continues Proud Tradition of Diebold E-Voting Screw-Ups
• Make the E-voting System’s Password “1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8″? That’s so Obvious It’s Genius!
• Diebold: A New Beginning (to the First Step in E-Voting Terror)
• AccuVote? Bit of an Oxymoron, Don’t You Think?
• What Did You Expect? They All Run Windows…

[Image Credit: Diebold Variations]

But Sequoia Voting Systems is trying–really trying. Earlier this week thousands of phantom votes were cast in a Washington D.C. primary election that used Sequoia’s machines. This not a week after the Computer Security Group at the University of California at Santa Barbara demonstrated how astonishingly simple it is to hack the company’s e-voting systems.

Election officials initially blamed the cock-up on some defective memory in one of Sequoia’s machines. But the company denies this. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the [District's election] database,” spokesperson Michelle Shafer insisted. “There’s absolutely no problem with the machines in the polling places. No. No.”

OK. But if that’s the case, why were thousands of phantom votes recorded in the election? The answer to that question is particularly troubling: Sequoia doesn’t know. Neither does the D.C. Board of Elections. “All I can tell you is that we’re looking into it,” said Daniel Murphy, a spokesman for the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics.

Well, that’s reassuring. Especially with the November elections nearly upon us …

This morning the video site, which is jointly owned by NBC Universal (GE) and News Corp. (NWS) (which also owns Dow Jones and this site), said it will offer full episodes of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and the “Colbert Report” beginning today. The deal, which brings the popular late-night satirists to the site just in time for the presidential election, is something of a surprise, since Comedy Central parent company Viacom (VIA) has so far refused to sign on to Hulu.

But that may change if this first tentative experiment bears fruit. “I think with success breeds success. It could open some other doors,” said Erik Flannigan, executive vice president of digital media at MTV Networks, the Viacom division that runs Comedy Central. “Hulu in many ways may put the shows in front of some people who might be more casual viewers but who might be interested in what’s going on with the elections.”

“The findings in this study indicate that the computer-based voting systems in use in Ohio do not meet computer industry security standards and are susceptible to breaches of security that may jeopardize the integrity of the voting process,” said Brunner. “To put it in everyday terms, the tools needed to compromise an accurate vote count could be as simple as … using a magnet and a personal digital assistant.”

A Treo and a magnet? That’s all you’d need to compromise Ohio’s electronic voting systems? All of them? Yes. “It was worse than I anticipated,” Brunner told the New York Times. “I had hoped that perhaps one system would test superior to the others.”

So what’s the solution? Brunner recommends Ohio’s electronic voting systems be replaced with optical-scan paper ballot machines. But that’s expensive, and, some say, unecessary. “Certainly this report … will just absolutely throw Ohio into a complete tailspin going into the presidential election,” said Hamilton County Board of Elections Director John Williams. “I don’t think there has ever been a documented case of that happening. There certainly has never been a prosecution. … If you gave me the keys to the bank and combination of the safe, do you think I could break in? I could. Those again are not real-world scenarios under which we operate.”