Mon
Jul
14
2003

Diebold Voting Machine Fiasco

“I went into this Diebold thing with no real knowledge of the voting industry. When I left, I not only had a complete grasp, but I had a complete disrespect for these machines.

“And with the folks in the office who were so — you know, ‘I’m the political person, you have to know how the system works’ — they were so much more concerned about their own self importance, they were losing track of DO THE MACHINES COUNT THE VOTE PROPERLY!

“Because that’s what the people in Georgia need. And I’m one of them!”

This New Zealand web site, Scoop, is running a series of very long, very detailed reports. They are opinionated as hell, but the content appears to be genuine, including several gigabytes of files from a formerly public Diebold FTP server.

What have we learned? Touch screen voting machines by Diebold are fraught with errors, have huge failure rates (as much as 75% in some cases), have not undergone independent outside testing and verification, are open to tampering, including losing votes, faking votes, and the like, and are being used in several states. Scared yet?

The book is going on sale soon. Coverage in Salon, Seattle Weekly, News-Press.

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