It looks as though this will be the first presidential election in the history of France to use an electronic voting system. This is scary on a couple of counts: 1) There are lots and lots of French hackers. That actually doesn’t scare me all that much – it’s more that 2) Who authorized all voting machines? The French Interior Ministry. We know where this is going, right? Guess who was the Interior Minister when the voting machines got authorized? Yup. None other than Nicolas Sarkozy. (Plus, he’d gone to Washington to get some “advice” from Dubya last year.) Lastly, we all know that a French presidential election is not complete without their complots… Just ask Jacques Chirac about them.

From the New York Times:

“For France’s Socialists, among others, the coming presidential election could descend into a nightmare like last fall’s in Florida.

This is the first presidential election in France to use paperless computer voting. As many as 1.5 million of the 44.5 million registered voters are expected to cast their ballots electronically in more than 80 municipalities around the country.

But with election day less than three weeks away, opposition to the electronic voting machines has grown, in part because a small percentage of them are made by the same American company whose machines were involved in a bitterly disputed Congressional election in Florida last November…”

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