Georgia voters are Diebold guinea pigs

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.