Another first-hand report on Diebold voting machines
Thursday, March 18th, 2004There are serious security problems with Diebold voting machines, both theoretical and confirmed by observation in the field. Here is another first-hand report, this time detailing the performance of Diebold voting machines in the San Diego primary. Two of the six voting machines at the writer’s precinct failed and had to be closed.
[O]ur Inspector called the troubleshooter hotline. There were supposedly one hundred Diebold employees and some county troubleshooters covering about 1,200 precincts, which seems generous to me, but they didn’t dispatch anyone. Our problems were apparently minor compared to those at many of the other precincts….We had another technical problem later in the day, when a voter reported that his summary screen (the last step before casting the ballot) was blank. I confirmed that it was; everything else seemed normal, and the boxes were checked next to each candidate on the ballot, but there wasn’t anything on the screen where the votes should have been listed. I moved the voter to another station, chalking it up to a card programming error, and kept checking on that station. Another voter had the same problem shortly afterwards, and I closed the station. It appeared to have recorded all of the votes properly, but I can’t be 100% certain. If it hadn’t recorded some data, there wouldn’t have been anything that we could do. Again, the troubleshooter hotline didn’t send anyone out….
