Diebold machines nation-wide evidence tampering, poor quality control.

Emery County Clerk Bruce Funk has been running elections for 23 years.
He was quite content with his optical scan system. The state of Utah thought
otherwise: On Dec. 27, Funk took delivery on 40 Diebold TSx touch-screen
machines, part of a statewide directive.

"I had concerns about Diebold," says Funk, "but I thought, 'If the state is going
to mandate it, then I guess they'll assume responsibility if anything goes wrong.'"

Not so. He soon learned that he will be responsible but the state will decide
what election system will count the votes.

snip


Shortly after Funk received his "brand new" TSx machines, Diebold helped him
do acceptance testing. Two of the 40 machines promptly failed the test. Diebold
arranged to take them away.

The remaining machines showed several defects -- crooked paper feeds that jam,
memory card bay doors that wouldn't close, parts getting stuck, coming loose, falling off.

TAKING A CLOSER LOOK

Funk thought it might be a good idea to take a closer inventory.

He booted each machine up to check the battery. Some of the machines were
marked with little yellow dots, and he got to wondering about that, too. He studied
the screen messages, and noticed something very odd.

Most machines had about 25 MB of memory available, but some had only 7 MB of
free memory left. One had only 4 MB of available memory. For perspective, the
backup election file generated by the Diebold TSx is about 7.9 MB. Now why would
brand new voting machines have used-up memory?

TIME TO GET A MORE IN DEPTH EVALUATION

This prompted Funk to seek an evaluation. He asked Black Box Voting to help
him analyze his voting system.

Link: http://www.blackboxvoting.org.

:kick:

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