A good report from a couple of days ago from the I-Team in Cleveland, Ohio. Unfortunately, they tend to run such reports just before Election Days, when it’s too damned late to do a damn thing about it.
Nonetheless, some very good stuff here. Of particular note are the points from Diebold’s recommendations which “appear to border on the absurd,” that should voting machine memory cards be lost, “elections must be re-scheduled.” Or if they fail, as our recent story concerning Diebold’s admissions about memory card failures in Florida pointed towards, the company says “all voters will have to be called in to re-vote.”
Heckuva voting system guys. Check out the report, above right.
NOTE: Discussion of suing Diebold comes up in this piece yet again. Along with the same concerns, as heard elsewhere, about “the Catch-22” of suing voting machine vendors. Namely, counties are afraid to sue the company they rely on to run their next election! The counties and the vendors are “joined at the hip,” as the I-Team report points out. Call it a soft form of extortion, really.
If you haven’t already, please sign VoterAction’s petition calling on Congress to “conduct a full investigation into the dangers associated with the privatization of our public elections and to determine whether certain US voting systems companies have committed crimes under federal and state anti-fraud laws.”
For an early look at concerns, largely of voter-suppression issues, around the country, Alternet has a very good state-by-state preview this morning.
We live in Portage County Ohio. Just have to tell someone how furious I got today when we walked in and saw poster size signs taped to all the tables where you sign in. They were warning us not to commit VOTER FRAUD. And there we were surrounded by DIEBOLD machines. Made me want to hang a huge sign under each one reading HACKABLE!
Donna, if it weren’t so sad, it would be funny!!
Arent those signs absurd. We pollworkers were laughing as we posted that. The Ohio League of Women Voters documented only FOUR verifiable cases of voter fraud in the 2002 and 2004 election cycles in Ohio and how much did they spend on those ridiculous signs? I don’t know how you guys did in Portage yesterday but here in Cuyahoga things apparently ran smoothly. I doubt we’ll be using the machines in another couple of years.