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Diebold to Pay $2.6M Due to Insecure Voting Machines
sunilk writes "In a short period, Diebold has been at the center of several problems. Now it seeks to settle the lawsuit filed against it by the State of California by paying $2.6 million. Settlement comes because of flaws in the Diebold systems that could compromise election results."
30 percent of our national vote was cast on non-voter-verified electronic voting machines. Ohio also was at about 30 percent.
Realistically we will never know who exactly was elected this year and that's a big problem.
Until we can address the voting machine issue proper (with voter-verified votes at a minimum) Americans have lost their democracy for all intents and purposes.
Interestingly the only state that got this right was frickin Nevada. They did use the machines, but insisted that they produce voter-verified paper trails.
The rest of the nation could actually learn a thing or two from Nevada of all places.
In addition to all of that, what I find most hard to swallow is the lack of action on the part of our elected officials to avoid this mess. Election supervisors have known for years literally and bought the machines anyway.
This whole mess is a crime against the American People. People should be in jail over this. We send people away for far less (like duping a movie).
Sorry for the rant, but this issue bothers me more than any other because I cannot trust our national election. Even though I live in a state (Oregon) with a pretty solid voting system, my solid vote means nothing in light of Florida and Ohio both with significant election irregularities.
I am not convinced we actually chose our President this year. Americans should be just a bit more upset about that than they are. We get press reports on the Ukraine yet we see almost nothing about our own failed election.
Finally, this is not about who won or lost. It's that we will never actually know...
Blogging because I can...
For a little fun, see exactly where a little Diebold campaign money goes:
/.'ers, is just the tip of the iceberg.
from the public record...
Crowther, John Michael Mr.
8/27/2003 $2,000.00
Canton, OH 44708
Diebold Inc. -[Contribution]
BUSH-CHENEY '04 INC
D' Amico, Thomas R. Mr.
9/3/2003 $2,000.00
Canton, OH 44718
Diebold Inc. -[Contribution]
BUSH-CHENEY '04 INC
and that
Never mind that the Carter Center, which supervises elections around the world, considers our systems fubar.
And yet I do love America still. Curious indeed.
befuddled (noun) 1. Unable to create a pithy sig
> The biggest and best democracy in the universe has no idea if their last election is valid. Hmmm.
India is the largest democracy (by population).
Got bored over the summer and found this document which shows how to get past diebold's password "security" on the counting software and made a video on how I did it. It is beyond silly how easy this is.
-Mike
Everyone talks about how horribly insecure the touchscreens are.
But in a lot of counties that didn't use them, the results from things like optical scanners were still stored and calculated using GEMS. Which is not too secure.
Read that, and then read this.
The problems weren't with touchscreens. They were with GEMS, though. But whoever hacked Florida knew enough to not mess with touchscreens: they went right to the source, and that's also why it wasn't spotted.
And we've all seen this, about the Democrats trying to not let Diebold supply the voting machines to Ohio, after their CEO stated that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year"?
I'm still confused as to why no one (in mainstream America) seems to care at all. There was blatant fraud going on, particularly in Florida counties.
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suwain_2
Elections here use big mark-sense ballots, which are scanned when they go into the locked ballot box. You mark them with a felt-tip marker, using big marks that are unambiguous. They're counted automatically, but can easily be recounted manually if necessary. Any single ballot box can be recounted and verified against the scanner results for that box, so it's easy to check the accuracy of the system.
Here's his take on Diebold:
No ambiguity there.
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