More Trouble for Diebold, This Time in Georgia...

[donsu]

http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001875.htm

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The trouble reported by Gumbel today, comes out of Georgia, vis a vis the Democratic Secretary of State down there and what appears to be some less-than-above-board contractual shenanigans with Diebold and their hardware and software. The report also suggest that votes may have disappeared entirely from Diebold voting machines.

Gumbel reports, in a Huffington Post blog item today based on several original documents and contracts obtained via public records requests made by CountTheVote.org's Roxanne Jekot, that recent "elections were run on software that was not only untested but also uncertified, that key components broke down during live elections, that county officials were left clueless on how to operate the new machines because of a breakdown in the training schedule, and that the cost of installing the electronic touch-screen system jumped dramatically beyond the advertised $54 million, without proper legislative oversight or approval."

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• Georgia ran its first all-touch screen election, in November 2002, with software for which no evidence of legal certification had been submitted. Certification documents were still not forthcoming, in fact, as late as March 2003. Because of a meltdown in the schedule for training county election workers, Georgia ended up abdicating control of the election to Diebold technicians, who ran it on the state’s behalf – without the voters being told.

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That last item is particularly of note, given Diebold Spokesman, David Bear's repeated assertions to us, when we interviewed for comment on security concerns raised by "DIEB-THROAT", our anonymous company insider. Bear repeated over and over again to The BRAD BLOG that Diebold's software "has been used in hundreds of elections and there's never been a security issue" and that the company's voting machines have never lost a single vote. How he would know that, given so much of what we've learned about what we don't know about Diebold's machines and software, remains a mystery to us. Given Diebold's track-record of obscuring the truth about such issues from both customers and voters, we have little reason to have confidence in any of the "company lines."
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paper ballots, hand counted with an audience