Can Your ATM Play Beethoven?

bpiltz writes "A funk band in Harrisonburg, VA, called Midnight Spaghetti, has posted a story with photos about a newly installed Diebold Opteva 520 ATM at Carnegie Mellon University that crashed, then rebooted. The Windows XP operating system initialized without the actual ATM software. The result was a public desktop computer, with only a touch screen interface, left wide open for the amusement of the students at the most wired university in the U.S. Interestingly, Diebold is one of the leading manufacturers of e-voting machines."

Comments

Diebold chairman and CEO is a huge Bush supporter

[abelaye]

How are we supposed to trust a voting system, when the system itself is owned and operated by staunch supporters of the Bush administration?

I came across the following in the Graydon Carter's "Editor's Letter" section in the latest issue of Vanity Fair (April 2004):

"Walden O'Dell is chairman and CEO of Diebold, one of the largest electronic-voting-machine manufacturers in the country. He also happens to be a Bush 'pioneer,' which means he's raised at least $100,000 for the president's re-election campaign. In mid-2003, he helped organize a fund-raiser attended by Vice President Dick Cheney that brought in a further $600,000. A few months later, O'Dell called upon Ohio Republicans for even more money for the party, proclaiming his commitment to help 'Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.' Diebold itself has given $100,000 in soft-money contributions to the Republican National Committee. (The company has donated nothing to the Democrats.) One of the company's directors raised $200,000 for the Bush re-election campaign, and 11 other Diebold executives anted up $2,000 apiece."

Shouldn't these voting machines be operated by some kind of non-partisan/bi-partisan organization?

-- anthony