Diebold secretly "fixed" glitches in 2005, yet problems persist
By Cyrus Farivar 
posted Oct 27th 2006 9:01PM
posted Oct 27th 2006 9:01PM
Diebold's had so many problems recently that we're not even entirely sure which problem this latest "solution" was supposed to fix -- nor if it actually ended up causing even more headaches. It came out earlier this week that Diebold acknowledged quietly "fixing" 4,700 voting machines across four Maryland counties in 2005: Allegany, Dorchester, Montgomery and Prince George's. The problem was that sometimes the voting machines lock up, or as The Washington Post puts it "The screen freezes do not cause votes to be lost, officials said, but they confuse voters and election judges who sometimes wonder whether votes cast on a frozen machine will be counted." The newspaper continues, saying: "Critics said it raises concerns about whether the state and company officials have kept the public adequately informed about problems with a system that cost taxpayers $106 million." Um, yeah. If you're say, a state government and you've just spent over $100 million to buy voting equipment that allegedly improves our previous archaic system of paper voting, you might want to make damn sure that it actually does the job, and that you know what's going on at every step of the way. Now, this new problem/solution apparently is unrelated to that other vexatious problem involving unpredictable reboots. So, despite Diebold's assurances that all problems have been taken care of, the Post adds: "Even so, the two leading candidates for governor -- Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) and Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley (D) -- have called on voters to use absentee ballots in the election, citing uncertainties about the reliability of Maryland's system." That's just great.[Via The Associated Press]
In my local city government, they are also encouraging users to not use the computer voting systems because they tend to cause more troubles than they are worth.
What the told me is that they have two machines, that are connected together by a modem (used to combine the two machines' votes together into one "voting report"). However, this modem isn't "certified" by the government, so they can't use it so they have to add up votes for each machine together manually which they say is a huge pain in the ass. Thus they say if anyone asks, they tell them to use the paper ballots.
Interesting that they spend so much money, only to tell people not to use it.
I live in Brookfield, WI btw.
Its a good thing they arent wasting that money on crappy things like computers for schools. Hopefully the guy who made this decision gets re-elected!
quality.
I'm from Baltimore, and god dam Diebold. If they had all these glitches, but a paper trail, it wouldn't be AS bad as it is now, though still bad. The voting machines are that shitty, no joke. Gah.
"The screen freezes do not cause votes to be lost, officials said, but they confuse voters and election judges who sometimes wonder whether votes cast on a frozen machine will be counted."
That's a lie. The truth is government officials CAN'T know if they lost votes, because nothing is tracked.
not to mention, these machines are totally insecure, so it's not even possible to tell if these lock ups are due to bugs or something more sinister!
Anyone who cares about democracy in our country would do well to read this article:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/evoting.ars/1
For those in the U.S and have HBO, there's a documentary premiering on Saturday dealing with the problems with E-Voting. Thought it might enlighten me to how bad things really are and how much controversy is going to come in November due to this fiasco.
Why doesn't Engadget just add a "diebold" sub-category? There are certainly enough stories.