Finally. Someone is actually bothering to test the voting machines which voters have been complaining about as flipping their votes for years. In Montgomery County, OH, where an official complaint was recently filed by 20 voters who claimed vote-flipping on their Diebold DRE touch-screen systems, comes this refreshing, if disturbing, report from today’s Dayton Daily News…
He said it is impossible to know how many people finalized their electronic ballots without realizing that the Diebold Elections Systems machines were inaccurately registering their votes.
…
“No other counties in Ohio have done this analysis yet,” said Ellis Jacobs, senior attorney for Advocates for Basic Legal Equality. “My guess is now that we’ve done it here and found there were real problems, it will encourage boards of elections in other counties to do this same investigation.”
From Jacobs’ lips to God’s ears.
Oh, and there’s this little tidbit from the story:
Ah, yes. The trucking company dunnit! That’s the ticket!
(Hat-tip again to BRAD BLOG reader “A Concerned Citizen” for the heads up!)
Well, at least that’s one we haven’t heard before. I wonder what the trucking company has to say about that theory. Something tells me, they haven’t even been informed they’re being blamed.
This guy is coming dangerously close to blaming the machines for the problems. Obviously, we can’t use such a fragile appliance to count our votes.
“They done it and they went thatta way in an 18 wheeler”.
According to Diebold we can thank the Teamsters for electing bushie land?
Denial of the irk magnitude.
It just amazes me how we have SO MANY witnesses to votes being switched to Republican contenders (never read ONE story about someone saying it switched to Democratic).
Give us back our manual ballot – a hand counted, not switched, not disappearing means to vote for whom we feel is best qualified, either party.
It’s not going to happen, simply because the people who can make it happen are already bought and paid for corporate whores. They are part of the “axis of evil” receiving cash in suitcases in the middle of the night, who now own us.
If we are saved in time, it will because of people like Brad. Thank you, Brad, for your tireless efforts. I don’t know how you keep it up, but we sure appreciate it more than you could imagine!!
It’s not unreasonable to think a machines might be damaged in handling. But having several damaged in exactly the same way …. not so easy to believe.
BTW, Diebold uses Windows CE as its user interface, so who knows what’s happening under the hood. I would suspect Diebold got access to the Windows CE source code, so they may have modified something for a specific purpose in the DREs and it’s backfiring on them now. Law of unintended consequences and all that stuff.
Finally, note that even if damage is the REAL problem, it’s not something that would be caught in an internal Logic and Accuracy Test (LAT). The test is just an onboard program that exercises the logic of another program. So damage to the touch screen interface wouldn’t be detected by an automated LAT either at the warehouse or at the polling location.
They are asserting (and seemingly have empirical evidence to back it up!) that the machines are so fragile they can be easily damaged in transit. Thus it’s not unreasonable to require that ALL machines go through a MANUAL LAT AT THE PRECINCT (not an automated one!) before opening the polls.