Diebold Finally Admits its Voting Machines Drop Votes

[babbittd]

So there are at least two kinds of vote fraud. Good ol fashioned in your face stuff and the new fangled e-vote fraud. The U.S. hasn't come to grips with the latter yet on a national level. Despite that some state legislatures have reversed course and removed the machines and especially the strong steps taken by the California Secretary of State in 2007, talking about e-vote fraud is still relegated to the "loonie bin". Why is that?

From the
Crypto-Gram Newsletter (http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0809.html#5)

September 15, 2008

by Bruce Schneier


Premier Election Solutions, formerly called Diebold Election Systems, has finally admitted that a ten-year-old error has caused votes to be dropped.

It's unclear if this error is random or systematic. If it's random -- a small percentage of all votes are dropped -- then it is highly unlikely that this affected the outcome of any election. If it's systematic -- a small percentage of votes for a particular candidate are dropped -- then it is much more problematic.

Ohio is trying to sue.

In other news, election officials sometimes take voting machines home for the night.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/082208-e-voting-vendor-programming-errors-caused.html or http://tinyurl.com/69wzb2

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/26/decade_old_evoting_error/

http://www.engadget.com/2008/08/23/diebold-comes-clean-admits-that-its-e-voting-machines-are-fault/ or http://tinyurl.com/5fxkdp

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/08/21/ohio_voting_machines_contained.html or http://tinyurl.com/57ckcu

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/election2008/story/48508.html

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/mom-can-my-voting-machine-spend-the-night/index.html or http://tinyurl.com/6jtxze

My 2004 essay on election technology:
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0411.html#1

[sn1p3r]

"Those who cast the votes decide nothing.
Those who count the votes decide everything."

[nitroglycol]

So there are at least two kinds of vote fraud. Good ol fashioned in your face stuff and the new fangled e-vote fraud. The U.S. hasn't come to grips with the latter yet on a national level. Despite that some state legislatures have reversed course and removed the machines and especially the strong steps taken by the California Secretary of State in 2007, talking about e-vote fraud is still relegated to the "loonie bin". Why is that?
Because if it is actually true that systematic voting fraud is occurring in the US, then everything Americans have been conditioned to believe from infancy -- that the US is the world's greatest democracy, a beacon of freedom, equality, and justice -- is no longer true. The cognitive dissonance is too great for many Americans to accept.