Mercury News | 02/01/2004 | ELECTRONIC VOTING'S HIDDEN PERILS:
Posted on Sun, Feb. 01, 2004
ELECTRONIC VOTING'S HIDDEN PERILS
By Elise Ackerman
Mercury News
Poll workers in Alameda County noticed something strange on election night in October. As a computer counted absentee ballots in the recall race, workers were stunned to see a big surge in support for a fringe candidate named John Burton.
Concerned that their new $12.7 million Diebold electronic voting system had developed a glitch, election officials turned to a company representative who happened to be on hand.
Lucky he was there. For an unknown reason, the computerized tally program had begun to award votes for Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante to Burton, a socialist from Southern California.
Similar mishaps have occurred across the country since election officials embraced electronic voting in the wake of the Florida vote-counting debacle of 2000.
Diebold's vote-counting programs are unverifiable
trade secrets.
To guard against error and fraud, the state requires that the companies only install approved software on electronic voting machines. But in California, one of the biggest voting-equipment companies, Diebold Election Systems, provided 17 counties with uncertified software that was used in recent elections.
Notice that the only reason the glitch is confirmable is that paper ballots exist to compare to the electronic results.
Alameda County officials still don't know why the computer program failed on election night. In fact, they only discovered the malfunction because they could compare the paper absentee ballots the software was counting to the computer's tally. The rest of the county's voters cast electronic ballots. Nor were election workers aware at the time that their touch-screen machines were running unauthorized Diebold software in violation of California law, as a state investigation later discovered.
How many other problems will never be discovered if there is no paper trail? And don't forget
Diebold CEO Walden W. O'Dell promises to deliver votes to the President in the next election:
New York Times November 9, 2003
Machine Politics in the Digital Age
By MELANIE WARNER
In mid-August, Walden W. O'Dell, the chief executive of Diebold Inc., sat down at his computer to compose a letter inviting 100 wealthy and politically inclined friends to a Republican Party fund-raiser, to be held at his home in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year," wrote Mr. O'Dell, whose company is based in Canton, Ohio.
That is hardly unusual for Mr. O'Dell. A longtime Republican, he is a member of President Bush's "Rangers and Pioneers,'' an elite group of loyalists who have raised at least $100,000 each for the 2004 race.
But it is not the only way that Mr. O'Dell is involved in the election process. Through Diebold Election Systems, a subsidiary in McKinney, Tex., his company is among the country's biggest suppliers of paperless, touch-screen voting machines.
