Electronic Red Herring
by hannah
Dear Editor,
The touch-screen voting machines manufacture by Diebold are a red herring.
The New York Times' pronouncement that the concern about their part in
election fraud has been debunked by some experts is simply irrelevant,
because these machines, as far as we can tell at this point, are not the
source of fraudulent election returns.
The controversy over these new machines has made most everyone forget that
the older optiscan systems, which are supposed to be replaced, perhaps
because they actually have an auditable paper ballot, are also produced by
Diebold and its clone ES&S.
While the Diebold touch-screens have been decertified in California, the
Diebold optiscans are still in use in some California districts, as they
are in Florida, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina and
elsewhere. And it should be of some interest that there are reports that,
only in districts where these Diebold machines were in use during the
recall election, there were some very peculiar results. Specifically,
virtual unknowns got votes in distant counties, leading to the suspicion
that votes were skimmed from the front-runner and distributed down the
ballot.
In the 2000 election we were distracted by all kinds of blatant
disruptions. This time our attention has been distracted by the
touch-screen machines. And some people even argue that the similarity
between the 2004 and 2000 results validates the returns, regardless of how
illogical they seem.
Maybe it was just a prank by some soft-ware programmer that wondered what
would happen if he had every sixth Democratic vote assigned somewhere else.
Maybe there was no intentional fraud.Nevertheless, the results are just
too bizarre to be explained by chance.Fortunately, we do have paper
ballots that can be manually checked. But, that won't help us if nobody
bothers to look.