San Diego Union Tribune: Promise of electronic voting still unfulfilled

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL
E-glitches

Promise of electronic voting still unfulfilled

January 8, 2006

More than five years after the electoral fiasco in Florida prompted governments across the country to begin modernizing the way Americans vote, San Diego County's $31 million "state of the art" electronic system remains on the shelf, its future in limbo.

The ATM-like touch-screen system will not be used in Tuesday's special election to fill two vacancies on the San Diego City Council. It will not be used April 11 when voters begin choosing a replacement for disgraced former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham. It will not be used in the statewide primary election June 6. And, unless the system soon wins re-certification by Secretary of State Bruce McPherson, it will not be used in the Nov. 7 general election, either. And that might well mean the end of San Diego County's deal with the system's manufacturer, Diebold, the beleaguered Ohio-based industry leader in electronic voting equipment.

In fact, the one and only time the touch-screen system has been used here was in the March 2004 presidential primary, when a system glitch forced hundreds of polling places throughout the county to open late – several hours late in some cases – preventing an unknown number of voters from casting ballots and giving county election officials and Diebold a deservedly embarrassing black eye. Since then, the county's elections have been conducted using paper-based "optical scan" machines provided, free of charge to taxpayers, by Diebold. San Diego County is hardly alone. Nationwide, numerous state and local governments have found that, as with many new technologies, the reality of electronic voting has yet to live up to the promise.

(snip)

To be sure, there have also been far more instances of glitch-free uses of the electronic machines throughout the country. Still, America's democracy is built on the public's faith and confidence that everyone gets to vote, that every vote is counted and counted accurately. The numerous problems have undermined that confidence. We still believe that properly programmed, tested and certified electronic touch-screen machines are a dramatic improvement over any other system out there in terms of accuracy, reliability, ease of use and accessibility by people with hearing, visual or other impairments. But election officials and manufacturers have to get it right. And soon.


Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060108/news_mz1ed8bottom.html

of course, unbelievably stupid and wrong. How can you "get it right" with "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by Bushite corporations? Unless you're the SD Union-Tribune and only like Republicans in public office. Diebold "gets it right" in that sense.

The Diebold machines that just failed tests and were thrown out of Florida's capitol county were OPTISCANS! --the machines that SD county has fallen back on!

Cripes! Well, anyway, I think Americans have become pretty good at reading between the lines, and they will perceive, from the opening paragraphs, that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

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Throw Diebold and ES&S election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor' NOW! (--or the Pacific Ocean will do!)

Urge the Democratic Party to fund INDEPENDENT exit polls!

Real paper is better than a touchscreen, and a card reader gets the data into the machine just fine, and much cheaper, and with a reliable paper trail.