Posted on 02/17/2006 7:35:29 PM PST by byteback
California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson gave conditional approval Friday for counties to use two voting machines produced by Diebold Election Systems that he had previously questioned.
McPherson's office said in December that the Diebold machines failed one of the 10 criteria he established for voting machines because the source coding, or computer language, on their memory cards was not reviewed by independent investigators.
The coding performs two critical tasks — securing ballot entries and later providing instructions to election officials on how to access and tally the votes.
Since then, Diebold submitted the machines to further testing by University of California, Berkeley security analysts, who concluded that some of the codes on the memory cards need to be rewritten for long-term use.
Any immediate worries can be addressed by ensuring there is strict security during voting, the analysts said.
McPherson said the review persuaded him to authorize Diebold's Optical Scan and Touch-Screen voting systems, as long as counties take additional security precautions, including resetting the programmed code on the machines and keeping a written log of who has control of the memory cards.
Diebold is still required to make the long-term programming changes then resubmit the machines for independent testing.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Speed is not a factor in vote tabulations. There are usually months between voting and taking office or the implementation of new code.
Touch screen voting is especially offensive since it leaves no immediate, tangible record of the vote cast.
Diebold Announces First-Quarter Dividend
Finanzen.net, Germany - Feb 15, 2006
... Diebold reported revenue of $2.6 billion in 2005 and is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol 'DBD.' For more information, visit the ...
They just keep on doing us favors.
Lovely!
"McPherson's office said in December that the Diebold machines failed one of the 10 criteria"
Being able to change the vote to what we want as opposed to the stupid voter?
"This is a bad idea. Machines don't speed up vote counts or improve the accuracy of a hand count. They only speed up precinct reporting, regional tabulations and later statistical analysis."
They shorten the Dems fraud window from a period of weeks to just a few hours.
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