More on Our Man from Diebold's tenure in Georgia

The NC State Board of Elections has hired a Mr. Keith Long to assist them in picking voting machines from the entire state. Mr. Long is an ex-Diebold employee (2002-2005) who proudly stated in his resume that he "Directed a 60 million dollar project to successfully install 22,000 electronic voting machines in the State of Georgia on time and under budget."

Roxanne Jeckot, an anti-BBV activist I have worked with in Georgia, gives a little more context to this claim with some documents she obtained via FOIA requests.

In a November 19, 2002 letter to Diebold, Georgia Secretary of State, Cathy Cox, disputed an attempt by Diebold to charge the state for techincal support in two counties. Cox reminded Diebold that they had agreed to provide free support to all 159 counties because the training scheduled in the contract by Diebold was "technically and practically flawed and found to be inadequate for the task at hand".

In a December 2 letter to Diebold president, Bob Uroesevich, Cox outlined the outstanding problems with Diebold products. What is odd about this letter is that while Cox celebrates "the integrity and success of that election", she the puts forth a laundry list of problems that make the average person wonder exactly what they were celebrating.

• Screen freezes during voter use
• Error message stating "Memory Critically Low"
• Calibration problems potentially affecting the recording of voter's selection (this is the one they blame on voters when voters report the problem)
• Deficient "0808" patch (sounds ominous)
• Deficient and obsolescent memory cards (where votes are stored)
• Defective encoders (used to initialze ballots)
• Defective voting machines

Cox also mentions that Diebold has still failed to provide a proper accounting of equipment delivered (just what you want, voting machines floating around you can't account for).

(To give you some idea of the kind of guy Bob Urosevich is, when confronted by California legislators about having shoddy equipment sold to the state, he did apologize, saying, "We were caught. We apologize for that.")

In a follow up letter the next day, Bob Ray, the assistant SoS, follows up with a "draft" list of problems, pointing out that a final list would be provided on December 6.

This more detailed (but incomplete) list of problems documents even more issues that would make the average voter question the claim that Mr. Long had "successfully installed 22,000 voting machines in the State of Georgia on time and under budget".

• Evidence that the systems were certified to state and national standards was absent.
• Voter's selection of candidates improperly reflected on summary screen
• Faulty design of system led to voters trying to stick access cards (their ballot) into an "inappropriate location" (Must. Resist. Obvious. Smartass. Comment)
• Inadequate and innacurate training manuals
• Inadequate training of support staff
• Preparation and printing of absentee ballots "deficient"
• "Training on safeguards to prevent and detect tampering or theft not provided"(And these are the people who call me a a crank for worrying about security)
• Battery backup up time promised: 7 hours. Actual time: 4-6
• Five county servers failed prior to election day, ongoing problems after election day
• Diebold staff providing training were not adequately trained themselves
• Tech support vanished after election day leaving post-election tasks uncompleted

Quite a list. Feel confident about this fellow helping pick your voting equipment? Remember, he counts this as a success, imagine what it will be like if he has a few problems with our situation.