Monday, 10 November, 2003

Diebold. Diehard. The New York Times picked up on the unfolding Diebold story over the week-end Machine Politics in the Digital Age. This story has been simmering in the background for a while, I only began to follow it with a Slashdot post last week Slashdot | Students, ISP Sue Diebold (this is, I think, a follow on to the slashdot post that first caught my eye). Two parts of the general backstory came together when some group pulled a large cache of emails off Diebolds corporate website and began linking it and soliciting mirrors on this site. The issues were, first, concerns professional programmers had from a technical standpoint; whether such systems were really secure, and from the other side of the coin what guarantees exist for a tabulating system which is a massive proprietary closed-source software program that doesn't issue receipts. Second were concerns people, even people within Diebold, had with the systems performance in actual elections. Notoriously including a Florida precinct that uploaded negative 16 thousand votes for Gore in the last election. Diebold went into massed lawyer overdrive to shut these sites down and chase this information out of the publics reach. The EFF has stepped in on the side of the activists in this murky fair use vs copyright issue (covered by All Things Considered NPR : Activist Group to Sue E-Voting Firm) last Monday. The Times article introduced a whole new side to this by detailing that Diebolds CEO is a republican campaign fund raiser of the first water ["I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year"], and that 11 other diebold executives have donated money to President Bush's campaign. None have donated to any democratic campaigns. In such hands I do not see how a voter has any reasonable assured expectations from this corporations product. 11:04:59 PM    comment [];trackback [];

© Copyright 2003 Paul Bushmiller. Last update: 12/02/03; 10:43:01.