Blog 8: Beware new malfunction in Diebold voting machines

Beware new malfunction in Diebold voting machines
http://www.kentucky.com/216/story/551106.html

In the spirit (and fear) of the upcoming election, I bring you this article on the Diebold voting machines. I do not know the status of the current CEO of Diebold, but the former CEO (Walden O'Dell) was quoted as being "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year". (this quote was from 2003) A dark cloud has been cast over Diebold ever since. Walden O'Dell was forced to resign after this controversy arose.

As my focus article indicates, Diebold is still operating in a suspicious manner. From the article:

"In the case of Diebold, votes are being dropped when they are transferred from individual machines to the central server in a county's election headquarters. When an election worker inserts the memory card from a machine into the server, a green arrow is supposed to light up after all of the votes have been uploaded and added to the county's totals. In some cases, the green arrow is wrong, and none of the votes have been added."

Electronic voting is a big plus on a technological level. Votes are tabulated much more quickly. There are a lot of benefits. But, the system is not foolproof and can be easily hacked.

One can only recall the controversy of the 2000 election, which many people still contend was "stolen" by the Republicans with the aid of conservative Supreme Court justices.

The point has been made that Diebold provides many of the ATM machines currently in use. IF they can secure the ATM machines, they should be able to secure voting machines. This is true, the technology is in place. But there are still too many flaws in the process.

I am usually gung ho for the latest in technology, but when it comes to such an important election as the one coming up, I much prefer using the old technology - even if it takes "forever" to count the votes.