— By Brad Friedman from St. Louis…
Diebold’s once-vaunted Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) touch-screen voting machines are going the way of the Edsel.
Even the front page of their silly new “Premier Elections Solutions” website fails to include the discredited devices as one of their “Highlighted Products.” Instead, Diebold/Premier, the morally bankrupt, if not-yet-financially bankrupt spinoff company, is pushing their failed E-Pollbook systems, their paper-based optical-scan systems (which also frequently fail), and their long-ago-proven-hackable GEMS tabulating system.
Though they show a small picture of their DRE, it’s neither identified, linked, nor mentioned on the front page of their new site. That, despite their many years and millions of dollars spent pushing and lying about the hackable, inaccurate, unAmerican voting machine/scams.
Diebold’s DREs were recently decertified [PDF] for use in the state of California for anything above one machine per polling place to marginally meet federal disabled voter requirements (even though CA found they failed to even meet disabled accessibility standards). Johns Hopkins Computer Scientist Avi Rubin also enumerated, in an article last Thursday, a few reasons why nobody is any longer interested in the DREs that Diebold/Premier may — or may not be — still selling.
I really liked the old Edsel. I think it was just a bit ahead of its time – kind of like good old Diebold -great product but those damned election integrity advocates kept expecting the impossible – an accurate and transparent voting process. Who are these tin-foil hat fools anyway?
Seriously, it looks like just a matter of time, and likely very little time, before this “perfect storm” will wipe out e-voting permanently. Let’s hope so.
Brad, you work your butt off on this, and Desi puts up with you (kidding, I know she is just as dedicated as you are, and you guys are a great team). The BradBlog is THE premier site for daily and sometimes hourly updates on election integrity. You guys ROCK!!!