[BBV/Der Spiegel]A Bonanza for Errors

This weeks English Der Spiegel edition includes an BBV article (actually a translation). While it isn't especially interesting, I thought it might be worthwhile anyways.


America's Electronic Voting Machines Are Susceptible to Manipulation

Walden O'Dell is entitled to call himself a "Pioneer." The business leader from North Canton, Ohio, has qualified for the honorific because he collected 600,000 dollars for George W. Bush's election campaign. He accompanied this with a pledge to do everything possible to help Ohio "deliver its electoral votes to the president" in 2004.
But with this statement O'Dell has caused more of a stir than he could have wished. For the "Pioneer" is also chief executive of Diebold Inc., a company that among other things manufactures voting machines. About 40,000 of these are installed in 37 states and are supposed to record and count votes on November 2. Diebold is in second place, right behind the market leader, Election Systems and Software which achieved its top ranking under Chuck Hagel before he, a Republican, was elected senator from Nebraska.

Recently the states have left decisions about the technological side of voting procedures to private companies. It is shocking enough that the giants of the trade are vying to get close to the government. But in addition, O'Dell has inadvertently called attention to how susceptible the machines are to manipulation.

In principle, voting machines work like ATMs: The voter touches the name of his candidate on the screen. But instead of receiving some sort of receipt at the end of the transaction as he does from a money machine, he gets no receipt at all for the vote he has cast. Thus there is no way to check whether the machine has really recorded what it was supposed to have recorded.
...

http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/english/0,1518,280606,00.html
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/english/

now if the media and the people in the US would just wake up