Posted on 10/19/2002 4:18:25 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
Miami-Dade County police officers will guard expensive touch-screen voting machines around the clock at dozens of polling places for up to six days before the Nov. 5 election, county officials said Friday.
That's because the county plans to start taking the 6,850 machines to the precincts a week before the election, as it has always done in the past with its voting equipment. But this time, county administrators say they're worried about security.
Police will be assigned to protect precincts at community centers, bingo halls and other voting sites where there is no place to lock up the machines before Election Day, officials said.
The unprecedented precaution is not just because of the cost of the new machines -- $2,700 to $3,000 each. Officials said the county can't afford any more foul-ups like the September primary -- late-opening polls -- and 2000 presidential election -- hanging punch-card chads.
While no ballot machines were stolen in those elections, they turned into public-relations disasters because of serious questions about the accuracy of the county's vote totals.
''A lot of people are taking this to heart because they don't want us to be the joke of the nation,'' said Miami-Dade spokeswoman Nelda Fonticiella. ``We're going to get this right.''
She could not estimate the cost of the extra police protection, but it would add considerably to the department's expense of putting every officer on duty for the election itself.
The police -- along with other county agencies -- are preparing for the upcoming election as if it were a threatening hurricane or presidential visit.
The county plans to start delivering 6,850 iVotronic machines to Miami-Dade County's 553 polling places on Oct. 30, which is a Wednesday. It will take three days to transfer them from a Medley warehouse to the polling places, which have 754 precincts.
Taking voting machines to the polls one week before an election has been standard practice in Miami-Dade, said David Leahy, supervisor of elections. The county needs the extra time to make sure there are enough operating machines in place at each precinct.
But lack of security was never an issue with Miami-Dade's old-fashioned punch-card ballot machines, which were used in the 2000 presidential election. Police were never assigned to protect them before previous elections, even in September, when the touch-screen machines made their debut.
''We were always at risk in the past, but we never had a lot of problems,'' Leahy said. ``We won't be at risk in this election.''
Miami-Dade police devised the plan with the Elections Department and other county agencies as they inspected almost all 553 polling places in the past two weeks, Police Commander Frank Vecin said.
He said 25 teams found dozens of minor electrical and telephone-connection problems at 15 polling places and made the repairs. School officials also inspected 150 precincts on their properties, uncovering a few minor problems, he said. About 15 church sites also must be inspected on Sunday, he said.
Vecin said the overriding concern was securing the pricey touch-screen voting machines, which were purchased for $25 million by the county. The majority of those machines can be locked in closets or offices at most polling sites, he said.
But county officials decided it would be too risky to leave them in the hallways of unsecured voting facilities.
''If we go to a site where there is no lockable area, we will post an officer there around the clock,'' Vecin said.
The goal, he said: ``We have the duty of making sure everything works so the polling places open at 7 a.m. without glitches.''
I hope they have UPS for these things.And it wouldn't do to have problems with the telephone lines connected to them; when the command is sent out over the phone line to give the Democrats more votes, we wouldn't want the modem to be down!
Too late.
Ms. Fonticiella, your own Democrat Party turned you into a laughing stock and you willingly participated. Your suddenly found sense of pride rings hollow.
On another note, is there any news about those 18 voting machines that couldn't be located?
I hope, if they haven't, that each machine is somehow electronically tagged etc. so that if votes begin showing up from the missing machines-they will be discounted immediately.
of course they will ...
I really think Rush would love to have this on his website-as would Hannity and many others. Tooooo funny! Hey florida folks-a poster of this placed around Miami Dade County would be terrific! He he!
It was reported that 17 or 18 new machines were stolen in one of the Florida counties. Whoever stole them has had enough time to reverse engineer them and figure out how to rig them for fraud. Also, the workers who manufacture them know how to rig them for fraud.
This is the html version of the file http://www.essvote.com/pdf/iv031102.pdf.
GO to this link and review the INFO on the Ivotronic machines available...GOOGLE SEARCH I am quite familiar with various software validation processes that MUST be accomplished to PROVE that when you push the "ON" button, that a PLC controlled machine actually turns "ON"...or rotates and does what the code says it is supposed to do.
The "general public"--people who run and operate these machines get no training on validation and qualification of how these things are supposed to work.
You can be sure that there are little to no WRITTEN protocols that: Identify each smart card by a BARCODE and then verify each iVotronic machine by barcode. Each pair should then be compared against a master list.
TWO people should then sign and verify that each machine has been set up and operating correctly.
At the completion of voting, each machine must be rescanned and each smart card removed and barcode scanned. ANY deviation in ID should invalidate that machine. This is an absolute minimum thing that should be happening. BUT these people who run the polling places are NOT technically adept or knowledgeable. They can't even PROGRAM a VCR!! I have SEEN supposedly professional people with full degrees admit they can't even use their cell phone....makes you wonder who told them to get out of bed in the AM??
You can BET, that NOTHING like this goes on...there are going to be smart cards lying about on desks in the polling place---"Oh, HERE'S another one...put it in with the others..." they will say.
AND, it's NOT JUST IN FLA!! The lying DEMOSOCIALISTS will be doing this everywhere... These machines use a "smart card" flash device to capture the votes. The card
That was 18 and supposedly they "turned up" in Iraq to help with their voting process. Yeah, and we see how that turned out. I thought that was a joke when I first heard it. Now I don't know what to think.
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