MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT THOSE DAMNED DIEBOLD MACHINES

Dennis Kucinich has called for a re-count in the NH Democratic primary (he pays for it), in light of descrepancies between results in the hand-counting towns and those relying on Diebold electonic voting machines to record votes. David Lindoff at Counterpunch comments.

But there were anomalies in the numbers that have some people suggesting something else: vote fraud.

What has had eyebrows raised is a significant discrepancy between the vote counts done by voting machine, and the ones done by hand.

In New Hampshire, 81 per cent of the voting was done in towns and cities that had purchased optical scan machines from the Diebold Election Systems (now called Premiere Election Solutions), a division of Diebold Corp., a company founded by and still linked to wealthy right-wing investors. In those towns, all voting was done on the devices, called Accuvote machines, which read paper ballots completed by voters who use pens or pencils to fill in little ovals next to the candidate of their choice. The ballots are then fed into, read, and tallied by the machines. The other 19 per cent of voting was done in towns that had opted not to use the machine, and to use hand-counted paper ballots instead.

The machine tally was Clinton 39.6 per cent, Obama 36.3 per cent - fairly close to the final outcome. But the hand-counted ballot count broke significantly differently: Clinton 34.9 per cent, Obama 38.6 per cent.

Could something have happened in those machines to shift some votes away from Obama or some of the other candidates in the race, and over to the Clinton total?

I first heard about it earlier this morning on the WBUR radio program, On Point. The political news reporters were shocked....shocked! that anyone would bring up such a possibility! No surprise about their reaction.

E-voting screwup leads judge to void election results

SCHOLARS & ROGUES E-voting screwup leads judge to void election results 2 October 2007 -

As an amusing coda to my posts discussing the need for paper audit trails in electronic voting, and the industry’s opposition to same, here’s a look at what happens when you trust e-voting machines to handle a simple ballot initivative, and things go very wrong:

An Alameda County judge has voided election results for a failed 2004 Berkeley medical marijuana measure, ordering it returned to the ballot next year because county election officials failed to hand over data from voting machines, attorneys in the case said Thursday…In her ruling Tuesday, Smith said county officials had failed to retrieve backup data from electronic voting machines, logs of activity on the machines and other records as she had specifically ordered. Instead, the county ignored the request and returned the devices to their manufacturer, Diebold Election Systems, after the measure’s advocates had sued the county seeking access to the data, the judge said.

If there had been some kind of verifiable paper audit trail to use after the votes had been cast, this might not have happened. By retaining the audit records solely in electronic form on the machines, Diebold was able to eliminate the vast bulk of the vote records, necessitating a fresh start. While the bulk of culpability lies with the county election officials who undoubtedly returned the machines to Diebold to avoid revealing that the measure won, the fact remains that this data is all too easy to destroy, and we can’t trust any single source to maintain control over it. Democracy and the voting process are too important to entrust to avaricious companies, faulty technology, and corrupt officials.

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