Black Box Voting

The Connecticut Secretary of State requested that the UConn VoTeR Center perform a pre-election audit of the memory cards for the Diebold Accu-Vote Optical Scan tabulators used in the August 2008 Connecticut Primary Elections

The audit found that of 185 Diebold voter cards, 175 were found to be properly programmed, the rest contained junk data.  The machines are supposed to be able to detect this, so supposedly the cards could not be used in an election.  5.4% is a high failure rate when trying to prevent chaos on election day.  The cards were shipped to UConn directly from the vendor, LHS.

This failure rate doesn't surprise me at all. Just look at Voters Unite's llong laundry list of problems with Diebold (that we know about) over the past several years.  Standards for voting vendors are terribly low, they've been given a free pass for too long. 

John Gideon has been putting out a newsletter of voting machine and election problems for nearly 5 years now. Thanks to John's daily news, many of us from different states learned that we shared similar problems with faulty voting machines and irresponsible voting vendors.  Thanks to John's daily news - activists from different states began to find and share solutions, and ways to create solutions.  Together we face the 2008 election, and wonder if our work has made any difference, or enough of a difference, and whether our votes will count.  Today John gives an overview of what he has seen: 

For those of you who don't subscribe to "Daily Voting News" below

is my rant for today:

 

I'm 61 years old. I've been doing this work full-time for nearly the

last five years. I long for the days, before I learned so much, when I

was ignorant about dirty tricks, phony voter fraud accusations, voter

list purges, voter suppression, poorly designed and inaccurate voting

machines, absentee paper ballots that have the voters political party on

the mail-in envelope (Yes, Broward Co Florida does that and strips

privacy away from the voters and state law allows them to do it), long

lines at the polls, and every other attempt to keep voters from voting

and votes from being counted accurately, if at all. It was kinda nice

not knowing about all of those issues. Oh, maybe someone would bring up

the old story about ballot boxes floating in the bay. What bay was that?

San Francisco? Lake Michigan off of Chicago? The Hudson River? The

location seems to have changed with the person telling the story. It was

nice thinking our democracy actually worked the way our founding fathers

envisioned it would. It was nice thinking that, no matter for whom I

voted, the majority voice was heard. Now, it just feels dirty and

somewhat depressing. I know way too much. It was nice being ignorant.

--

John Gideon

Co-Executive Director

VotersUnite.Org

www.votersunite.org