I am posting this here for the original diarist RoxanneJ. This diary was posted at Dembloggers and also linked at www.peopleforchange.net
Roxanne is not a member here so she gave me permission to post this for her.
This is regarding the meeting McKinney had in Georgia to expose the fact that the people of that state were used as guinea pigs during actual elections.
If this doesn’t make you furious I don’t know what will. There is video of the meeting linked below.
Yesterday, thanks to Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, a new window opened on the facts of electronic voting. We discovered the State of Georgia agreed to use Georgia voters as guinea pigs and Diebold’s beta test of electronic voting.
We learned yesterday that Georgia’s 2002 election was fraught with errors, mistakes and a massive failure of the Diebold voting system.
The 2002 General Election in Georgia was the “beta test” of Diebold’s touchscreen voting system and Georgia’s elected officials agreed to the test, paying Diebold $54 million dollars in taxpayer money for the “honor.”
What McKinnney’s office has just released is a group of documents that lend the visible evidence necessary to take this issue out of the hands of conspiracy theorists, and put it in the public purview of government officials.
Georgia’s Diebold elections have been fraught with massive problems from day one and election officials have hidden the problems from the voters.
Georgia’s election officials sought to protect Diebold instead of the voters.
The first document is a list of bugs and failures experienced in Georgia’s 2002 election, none of which have been resolved to date, much less in time for the 2004 election.
Mr. Sam Barber of American Computer Technologies, Inc. has filed a federal lawsuit against Diebold. ACT was originally a Minority Owned Business contacted by Diebold to subcontract the Acceptance Testing of the Diebold system. When they discovered Mr. Barber really intended to test the equipment as prescribed by computer science, they threw him off the contract.
What they WANTED Mr. Barber’s company to do was assemble the 2 pieces of equipment and CALL it acceptance testing. When he refused, he was dismissed by Diebold in McKinney, TX.
As we know from Rob Behler, the computer neophyte hired by ABSS, they found a company willing to do just that:
Behler: “My background is normally telecom…….
Behler: “Of course you have to have the touchscreens assembled in the warehouse, and do some testing. It turned out that there were a lot of problems that needed to be dealt with, and they simply weren’t dealing with them.”
Behler: “No, it’s not just that. NOBODY even tested it! When I found that out — I mean you can’t not test a fix — I worked for a billing company, and if I’d put a fix on that wasn’t tested I’d have gotten FIRED! You have to make sure whatever fix you did didn’t break something else. But they didn’t even TEST the fixes before they told us to install them. “Look, we’re doing this and 50-60 percent of the machines are still freezing up! Turn it on, get one result. Turn it off and next time you turn it on you get a different result. Six times, you’d get six different results.”
Georgia activists at CountTheVote.org, and the Voter Choice Coalition have been fighting to repair the visible problems with electronic voting for almost 3 years now; since late 2002.
At every turn, with each step, it has been the Secretary of State in Georgia who has prevented even the most basic changes to this system, including a voter verified paper ballot. The SoS office turned out in full to lobby against our first legislative attempt to bring verification to this system – SB500.
During Ms. McKinney’s press conference we learned, through the production of the documents, the SoS was well aware of the problems with this system, even as she testified to their accuracy at Senate committee hearings while lobbying against SB500.
The documents are available here
Congresswoman McKinney plans to hold a series of press conferences to bring this issue to the voters of Georgia; to ensure the voters are informed and to call for reform to correct the problems with Georgia’s voting system.
Link to P4C discussion
Link to dembloggers post
where the video is located.
dkos Thread…(please to recommend so it was stay visible today.) You know how those diaries disapear.
Hi, if you think this message is important please recommend this diary and the one at dkos. I am assuming that McKinney will be calling for some sort of action soon and it would be great if people were really informed about this issue.
but it is just one of so many outrages. My brain is going to explode and I need a better outlet than diaries and endless talking forums.
My babysitting stint ends August 2nd and I hope to hit the streets.
My grandson saw the best of me- Bush will see the worst of me!
Right behind you Rosie. Gramma’s for Truth and transparency in government?
had to install files (“patches”) sent by Diebold; the file or directory with the patches was named, ironically, robgeorgia.
Not rob, as in the verb steal. Rob as in “these are for Rob (in Georgia).” Still the irony catches you, because these patch files weren’t tested or “certified” by the independent testing lab for software, Ciber Inc., or by the SoS.
That patch, named for Rob, and another patch of 6.28.02 were for the GEMS central tabulator.
Beyond these, an uncertified patch of August 8, 2002 “altered at least nine “drivers” …. [including]: the keyboard driver, a keyboard backlite driver, the PCMCIA card driver, the smartcard driver, the touchscreen driver, the printer driver.
NOW HERE IS THE GODDAMN SMOKING Gun ! for the Georgia 2002 election ( –and– I’ve N-e-v-e-r used that term before) —>>>
Read the election post-mortem bug-list of Diebold dated 12/23/2002. For context, be sure to see also column 3 of the list which tells what the state wants for the fix (“solutions desired”) for the problem. BETTER Yet, have someone techy/geeky look it over.
THESE are items that matter the most, I think: #1, 2 thru 6, especially 6, asking also for “Confirmation that ‘0808’ patch was applied to all systems” (in the state) …. [ In other words, the SoS seems to doubt whether the patch was applied uniformly in every locale and to all relevant machines statewide.] 11, 12, 7-9, especially 14 related to absentee ballots printed for op-scanning **[See column 2 re Justice Dept. intervention] **
Note on item 14: Diebold seemed very satisfied in this email with its printer subcontractors for absentee/provisionals and with its own manager John Elder — but the state seems to be asking for a vendor more independent of Diebold Election Systems (“DESI”).
Also 23, 25, 26, 27.
Credit: Primarily to Bev Harris (blackboxvoting.org, yes I know she sparks controversy) — for digging all of this up about Georgia patches.
I want to say this about Bev Harris. She’s gotten heat for her style and some drama, and for some charges she made that didn’t pan out (–yet). But here’s the important and scariest, scariest thing about Bev Harris and bbv: nearly everything that she has uncovered and documented fully about the workings, auditability and lax security of voting systems has turned out to be true.
Why do you think she’s been smeared so loudly?
I should note that, as a computer scientist, #5 is the most interesting. This says that they noticed votes being switched on the summary screen, managed to catch it happening (IE, it is not a result of a calibration problem), and it was not fixed before the 2002 elections. Heck, it apparently wasn’t fixed before the 2004 elections. #19 is also pretty damning, and #26 is just plain interesting. Any other tech company that pulled a stunt like that in any other field would lose the contract so fast, their heads would spin.
Remember black box voting? They’re still at it with this publication of Diebold documents found in a dumpster (kind of begs for a limerick, doesn’t it?)
oh so many things beg for a limerick these days.
BTW, thanks for all of those people who have recommended this diary.