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Legal Troubles Continue To Mount For Diebold
dstates writes "The State of Maryland has filed a $8.5M claim against Premier Election Systems (previously known as Diebold), joining Ohio in seeking damages from the company. The claim alleges that election officials were forced to spend millions of dollars to address multiple security flaws in the machines. Previously, Diebold paid millions to settle a California lawsuit over security issues in their machines. The dispute comes as Maryland and Virginia prepare to scrap the touch screen electronic voting systems they bought after the 2000 presidential election. California, Florida, New Mexico, and Iowa have already switched to optical scanners, and voters in Pennsylvania are suing to prevent the use of paperless electronic voting systems in their state. Meanwhile, Artifex Software is suing Diebold for violations of the GPL covering the Ghostscript software technology used in the proprietary voting machines."
The truth is that while paperless may sound sexy it is not really practical.
The truth is that Diebold's problems have nothing to do with the paper or paperless issue, and everything to do with incompetent design and execution. Which is all the more galling considering the relative straight-forwardness of the programming task. A corrupt or inaccurate paper audit trail would be just as useful as no audit trail at all, and arguably more harmful.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Well not exactly. Diebold managed to screw up several parts of the system.
The software
The lousy hardware locks
The poor update process
Just to name three off the top of my head before my second cup of coffee. Makes one wonder about Hanlon's razor. I guess you gotta be good at something.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Grubby little paws? Corporations I know have huge powerful sucking tentacles, and they're in everything.
Won't work. Once the vote is public information, people can be bought/pressured to change their vote.
then don't rant - act
Think I haven't? Short of taking up arms against my country, I've done all the legal things I can. The tide is turning, I think, but it takes a long time to wake up the U.S.A.
I honestly believe that the vast majority of Americans are motivated less by money and more by "doing the right thing." The problems is that "the right thing to do" has been purposefully obfuscated by the bastards in power. By using christiantity and the talking heads of talk radio, propaganda minister of the Bush administration, Karl Rove, has successfully turned America in against itself. Dividing families and groups against each other over simplistic moral debates, while completely drowning the substantive discussions about what is truly best for the country.
All this so that they can rob the country of its wealth and make themselves rich at the same time.
I'll say here and now, Bush and Cheney and everyone in their administration have been traitors to the U.S.A.
Signed, patriotic American!!