Reply #22: Diebold execs gave 100% of their campaign contributions to Repubs, [View All]

and (until early this week--he just resigned) had a CEO, Wally O'Dell, who was a Bush/Cheney campaign chair and promised in writing to "help deliver Ohio" to Bush/Cheney in 2004. For starters. They have programmers who were convicted felons. They were/are also pushing paperless touchscreen voting (called DREs--Direct Recording somethings), and it seems their machines are just plain crappy (in addition to being hackable, and containing secret programming), and repeatedly fail tests. Built on Windows. Former Dem CA Sec of State Kevin Shelley banned Diebold touchscreens in Calif, prior to the 2004 election, and sued the company because Diebold LIED to him about the security of these machines.

The recent tests in Florida were of Diebold OPTICAL SCAN voting machines (not DREs), which are much more widespread than DREs. They repeatedly failed security tests. (Hackers easily hacked into them.)

ES&S has similar electronic voting machine architecture (they were one company at one time), and was initially funded by far rightwing billionaire H. Ahmanson (a real Nazi). (Diebold and ES&S are now run by two brothers, and dominate 80% of the market.) ES&S does both optiscan and touchscreen.

As for Sequoia, they now employ former Repub CA Sec of State Bill Jones and his chief aide Alfie Charles, who brought this electronic voting nightmare to Calif, then left office to work for one of the companies (Sequoia), a completely corrupt thing to do.

ALL of these electronic voting systems include 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code (software and firmware), with virtually no audit/recount controls. If they have no paper trail (1/3 of the country in 2004), there is zero audit/recount capability. If they have some kind of "paper trail," it may or may not be useless--it may just duplicate the machine results. A "voter verified paper audit trail" (VVPAT) is better--you have a separate record of the vote. A "voter verified paper BALLOT" is best since its legal standing as the vote of record is secure. But even if you get a good paper record, try to get a recount! It's been made virtually impossible for ordinary citizens, and not easy for candidates. Audits (automatic recounts) are 1% at best. This is NOT sufficient for electronic voting. (10% automatic recount of the vote, at least, is needed.)

And It gets worse. In addition to individual voting machines, you have the central tabulators. (Diebold's are called GEMS.) ALL votes--absentee ballots, paper ballots of every kind, not just the electronic votes--are fed into computers and go the central tabulators, which are ALSO extremely insecure and hackable. The only thing you gain with a paper ballot is that, IF there is a recount (big if) you have a tangible paper record to compare the electronic results to. It also may deter some fraud (fear of getting caught).

ES&S and Sequoia are little better--in fact, no better--than Diebold on insecurity and hackability. They seem to be a little more stable. That's it. All have secret programming. The big three lavishly lobby election officials, and are corrupt Republican corporations. There is no reason to trust any of them. They should all be banished from our election system.

We need to have complete transparency in elections. You can't have that with private corporations running elections. How could they make a profit? (Yup. Profiting from you vote.)

We could conceivably do electronic elections using non-profit corporations and OPEN SOURCE CODE. But the stench around electronic voting is so bad, just give me a PAPER BALLOT, please, and LET ME SEE YOU COUNT MY VOTE, hands on the table, at human speed.