Has Anyone heard about Diebold "Rovers" or of Local "Savvy" People....

[EMunster]

July Article
07-09-2004

Ohio election board not concerned, but ready for trouble

By John McCarthy, Associated Press

COLUMBUS, Ohio — When Hardin County replaces its lever voting machines with electronic ones on Nov. 2, the board of elections will be relaxed but ready should any problems arise, its director says.

(snip)

"We wouldn't be going forward if we had any fears. We will have extra programmed machines to take out if anything happens," Boston said. "Diebold will have rovers (technicians) and we will have local people who are savvy with electronic equipment."




http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2004-07-09-ohio-evote_x.htm

[chorti]

1. hardin switched to OpScan not touchscreen

Hardin ended up using Diebold Optical Scan machines rather than Diebold touchscreen after Diebold DREs did not pass state tests. The counting/tabulating software could still be tampered but it would be much harder to cover up. And I'm sure Diebold had rovers in any case, just like all voting machine manufacturers. The counting and tabulating software code for all manufacturers needs to be made public and needs to be verified in each county.

[understandinglife]

2. Ballots must be counted 'by hand', by a person. It is totally unacceptable

merely to re-process ballots through any form of electronic scanning.

What must happen is, to the extent that actual ballots (punch cards, pieces of paper) exist in any OH county, that they be counted by a person (as has been happening in WA State).

Then, a comparison can be made to what resides in each County's database from the original tabulation (on or after 2 Nov 2004).

To the extent that we can force an investigation, separate from the act of manually counting the ballots, those ballots that had been electronically scanned, should be scanned again and the results compared both to the hand count and to the output of the tabulators associated with each scanner.

It is reasonable to say -- forget about any vote cast on a device without a physical (paper) record generated at the time the person voted. Any pretense to any credible value of votes stored only as electrons is not "OZ"; it's bullshit.

Peace.

"I'm an American patriot, not a pro-fraud theocrat"