Diebold Follies

Robert X. Cringely has some comments about Diebold's balking at the attempts by legislators to pass laws requiring paper printouts of electonic voting machines (snippet):

....By now we know that touchscreen voting machines are suspect. They can be tampered with by determined folks, potentially changing an election. And most of them appear to be incapable of supporting effective vote recounts, even if those recounts are mandated by law. I wrote about this long ago and now many writers cover the same material, but I don't think we have been doing a very good job. For example, the tide appears to have turned, and voting officials are now starting to demand that touchscreen voting machines be able to generate a paper audit trail of every vote. This has the voting machine vendors crying foul ("We know that requirement was always in the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), but we talked you out of it, right?") and asking for more money -- lots more money -- to add printers to their touchscreen machines. That is IF the printers can even be added, the technical challenge is so great. Then this week I heard from reader Jed Rothwell, fresh from a day working the polls as a voting clerk. Jed says in the case of Diebold machines at least, there was a printer inside already. Jed writes, "Meg Smothers of the League of Women Voters recently said that Georgia has 28,000 voting machines, and it would cost $15 million to retrofit them with printers to produce receipts. That comes to $535 per machine. Yet these machines already have printers. They produce a paper receipt at the end of the day showing the vote tallies. The printers are the kind used in cash registers, and they have large rolls of paper that would easily last through the 12 hours the polls remain open. It takes people about a minute to cast a ballot, so one machine would need to print at most 720 receipts per day. The printer and paper are located on the right side of the machine, under a locked metal cover. It would be a simple matter to fabricate a new metal equipment cover with an outlet above the printer, that would print a receipt for the voter. Based on the retail cost of similar metal computer equipment cases available in any computer store, this should cost approximately $30 per machine, not $500. The programming change would be trivial."....

If you haven't figured out by now that Diebold, which is essentially run by the Republican Party, is going to behave exactly like a Bush Republican (i.e. lie, stall, misrepresent), then now of this will make sense to you. As Left is Right has been saying for about a year now, voting fraud via electronic voting maching tampering is going to be the undoing of the Democrats in November, 2004. Get you information HERE and HERE.