Says Sending Hackable Diebold Voting Machines Home With Pollworkers an 'Egregious Violation of Chain-of-Custody Precautions'
By Brad Friedman on 6/14/2006, 6:45am PT  

Warren Stewart, Director of Legislative Issues and Policy for VoteTrustUSA calls the Busby/Bilbray election into doubt in his article yesterday, headlined, "Vendor Failures and Lax Security Procedures Call Election Results Into Question In States Across The Country":

...In the most closely-watched election in the nation last week – the special election to fill Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunnigham’s vacant US House seat representing California’s 50th District – volunteer pollworkers were allowed to take Diebold voting machines home as much as two weeks before the election. That’s right – in spite of new "security procedures" issued by Secretary of State Bruce McPherson when he “conditionally” re-certified Diebold’s equipment for use in the state, these machines had “sleepovers” in pollworkers’ garages. Given this egregious violation of chain-of-custody precautions, its no wonder that the accuracy of the election has been called into question.

The fact that the official results are “plausible” in California’s special election is beside the point. In fact, if the corrupted results had been “plausible” in Pottawattamie County, there would have been no scrutiny and losing candidates would have been elected. After a publicly observed hand count of the ballots, voters can be reasonably confident in the results of elections in Pottawattmie County. Without a similar hand count of the California special election, voters have no reason to believe the official results are accurate.

Election officials should be held accountable for the voting technology they have advocated.
...
Having used millions in taxpayer dollars to buy unverifiable, error-prone equipment to count the votes in our elections from their friends at ES&S, Diebold, Sequoia, and Hart Intercivic, the burden is on the election officials to prove that those votes were counted correctly.

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