Suits a red flag on voting machines

Source: St. Pete Times

Pinellas County today will decide whether to bu optical scan voting equipment from Election Systems & Software, a company that came under fire after a controversial election in Sarasota and that the state of California and San Francisco sued last week.

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Early Monday, interim Pinellas administrator Fred Marquis said he was considering pulling the $6-million contract from today's County Commission agenda. "It didn't sound like anything that affected our specific situation," Marquis said of the events in California. "Had they been suing because of faulty equipment...we would have been a lot more concerned."

Read more: http://www.sptimes.com/2007/11/27/timesfront/Times_1A.pdf

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The link is the pdf of the front page. The article is not downloadable yet. I cannot believe that these idiots are going to spend millions more after the DRE failures in the last 2 elections and the mess in Sarasota. Unless there is money under the table or someone's son-in-law works for E&S, there is no support from anyone to continue buying this stuff! Maybe they are shopping for a system that is compatible with the tabulator hacking software that they already paid for...

I'm a proud resident of the state that first brought you hanging chads, court-ordered election results, butterfly ballots, Jews for Buchannan, DRE switching, Katherine Harris, millions of undervotes, edited registration rolls, ID challenges, and Tom Feeney's computer hacking program. Now I live in a county that wants to buy E&S voting systems!?!?!

Anyone who thinks we're a bunch of conspiracy theorists down here doesn't need to rely on exit polls or investigations. Just stand in line to vote and talk to your neighbors while you're standing there. No one believes it's anything but a waste of to show up to cast a ballot.

They are assembled in sweatshops in the Philippines and are plagued with faulty screens and software. Here in Lee Co. over 1,800 touch screen models had to be sent back in 2003 due to "defects". Now the county is shopping for more machines that provide the required paper trail, but the local administrators are squabbling over the costs.

Here is a good article on ES&S:

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/08/dan-rather-inve.html

Don't get me wrong. I don't trust ES&S either after all the crap that's been pulled in the last three elections. That said, at least with optical scan, there are paper ballots that can be counted, verified, audited, etc. This isn't a black box system unless the local election officials make it one by destroying ballots or never verifying results even with spot hand-count audits.

I say this because my county in Wisconsin has used ES&S optical scan equipment for 4 years (as our secretary of state has always required paper ballots in one form or another) and they do a post election canvass matching the number of ballots to the voter registration lists as well as a handcount of select municipalities or portions thereof as a way to detect fraud/software problems. And the ballots are always available for a recount.