"...A former worker in Diebold's Georgia warehouse says the company installed patches on its machines before the state's 2002 gubernatorial election that were never certified by independent testing authorities or cleared with Georgia election officials.
If the charges are true, Diebold could be in violation of federal and state election-certification rules. The charges also raise questions about the integrity of the Georgia election results and any other election that uses patched Diebold systems that have not been re-certified."
Black Box Voting has been following this issue. They've been suspended due to a copyright dispute with Diebold (isn't this the same tactic the Scientologists used against their opponents?) but some of their material can be found here
Two more links:
www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0211/S00078.htm
- All the post polling swings in favour of the democratic party were within the margin of error.
- Several of the post polling swings in favour of the republican party were well outside the margin of error.
- In the states where the senate races were critical and close the swing was predominantly towards the Republicans, with the exceptions of Arkansas and Missouri. The level of post-poll swing in these races in favour of the Republican Party in each race were: North Carolina 3, Colorado 4, Georgia 9-12, Minnesota 8-11, Texas 3-11, New Hampshire 1.
- The state where the biggest upset occurred, Georgia, is also the state that ran its election with the most electronic voting machines.
While the American People were watching reports on Chads in Florida during the 2000 Presidential Elections, the story of 94,000 Floridians being incorrectly placed on a voter "purge" list prior to the 2000 election went unreported until Greg Palast reported it in the BBC. We also later learned from the Los Angeles Times that an additional 179,855 ballots went uncounted. The sum of these disenfranchised Floridians is far greater than the 537-vote margin of victory that we witnessed in Florida.
On Slashdot, where Michael found a link to this article, someone made this comment:
Let's see if I have this right.A Republican congressman owns a company that sells voting machines
The voting machines are closed source with no audit trail
The voting machines are easily manipulated by anyone with a moderate amount of knowledge of excel
untested and uncertified patches are known to have been placed on voting machines prior to elections
Republicans continue to defy odds and win elections that polls show them losing
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This happened in Alabama in the latest election for our governor. Initial results showed that the incumbant democrat had won the election, then a last minute change in the figures from a district with a republican in charge of election certification swung the election to the Republican. There was no recourse for the democratic incumbant.
Other commentators pointed out that Democrats aren't immune from the temptation to change election results. You'd think this would occur to Republicans.
Why don't they want to make the system secure and untainted for all? Why don't we even try?
"Did E-Vote Firm Patch Election?", Wired News, October 13, 2003, www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60563,00.html
