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Diebold CEO Resigns Under Cloud 342

Posted by Zonk from the should-have-gone-into-another-business dept.
Philip K Dickhead writes "After numerous ethical lapses and much controversy, Diebold CEO, Wally O'Dell resigned to the applause of the markets. Diebold's price improved more than 5% today, as the story broke. Business Week is reporting that O'Dell is leaving for "personal reasons", although the news blog Raw Story cites board action on imminent securities fraud litigation, and legal challenges by states claiming fraudulent certification of Diebold voting machines. Latest vulnerability tests show an impossibly negligent attention to vote security and privacy." Not overly surprising, considering their recent childish antics in NC.
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Diebold CEO Resigns Under Cloud

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  • To invoke Office Space (Score:5, Funny)

    by wampus ( 1932 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @05:48PM (#14251406)
    Going to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison? Hey, a guy can hope.

    • Probably Not (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @06:32PM (#14251827) Homepage Journal
      Even if he's indicted, tried by a jury, found guilty and sentenced to a PMTA prison, his alleged services to the current administration would probably buy him a "Get out of Jail Free" card in the form of a presidental pardon for all crimes.

      • Re: Probably Not (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Black Parrot ( 19622 )
        > Even if he's indicted, tried by a jury, found guilty and sentenced to a PMTA prison, his alleged services to the current administration would probably buy him a "Get out of Jail Free" card in the form of a presidental pardon for all crimes.

        Bush doesn't seem the type to expend his scarce political capital on someone who can't help him anymore.

        Hell, he has to be reminded when it's time to throw the religious right a bone.

    • Re:To invoke Office Space (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I know it's a stretch for you kids, but just once can the subject of prison come up without you all coming out with the tired old litany of lame rape jokes please? You Yanks have a fucking obsession with prison rape. Seriously, it's not funny, it's creepy, quit it.

      • Re:To invoke Office Space (Score:4, Informative)

        by Geoffreyerffoeg ( 729040 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @06:57PM (#14252008)
        Seriously, it's not funny, it's creepy, quit it.

        It's from Office Space. He's not quoting the concept, he's quoting the movie. You really can't blame him; he's like the thousands of other people here who think that because a movie is funny, all its lines are funny, too.

        Now go find us a shrubbery.

      • prison rape is very unfunny (Score:4, Insightful)

        by bodrell ( 665409 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @10:06AM (#14255996) Journal
        I know it's a stretch for you kids, but just once can the subject of prison come up without you all coming out with the tired old litany of lame rape jokes please? You Yanks have a fucking obsession with prison rape. Seriously, it's not funny, it's creepy, quit it.

        You're completely right--it isn't funny. It's very, very scary. It's the reason people here are scared of going to jail. Sadly, a jail sentence almost guarantees cruel and unusual punishment in the form of anal rape. Last week on The Boondocks they covered this topic. One character is a lawyer who has always been straightlaced because of the threat of anal rape.

        I remember, from a few years ago, an anti-rape activist (found his name thanks to Google: Tom Cahill) who was protesting the Vietnam war while living in San Antonio, and the police basically caused him to be raped. They threw him in a room with a bunch of career criminals and allowed him to be raped for about 24 hours continuously. That was his punishment for protesting the war.

        By the way, I found his current website. [spr.org]

        I personally believe that almost all prisons in the US today violate the Constitutional Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment. [wikipedia.org] But hey, the retards in my government routinely extract suspects for torture in the name of fighting terrorism, so I shouldn't be surprised. Yet another example of why it is shameful to be an American. I just pray they don't reviolate the First Amendment by bringing back prayer in school (ahem--Intelligent Design).

  • hmm (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @05:49PM (#14251408)
    anyone here really trust the age of digital voting? i dont even have faith in the system when votes are done by hand, much less so in digitizing it.

    • Blue dye (Score:3, Insightful)

      by itomato ( 91092 )
      If it's good enough for fostering democracy, it ought to be good enough to maintain it!
    • properly done, a digital system can be more trustworthy then the paper method.

    • Re:hmm (Score:5, Insightful)

      by zCyl ( 14362 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @06:25PM (#14251757)
      I don't think many people here trust it, at least not under anything resembling current models. The major problem is that trust is so prevalent elsewhere. While vast majorities of computing experts are shouting about how dangerous electronic voting is in its current form, the general public is either unaware of the problem, or attributes the shouting to lunatic conspiracy theorists.

      I personally think you have to approach conspiracies with a supply/demand approach. When there's a demand for a conspiracy, and a means of supplying one, then inevitably someone will produce one. The rewards are so great for having a voting conspiracy that we can't do much about the demand side. So what we have to do is make sure no mechanism exists for supplying a voting conspiracy. So long as their exists such a mechanism, people will try to use it.

    • Re:hmm (Score:5, Informative)

      by Michalson ( 638911 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @06:27PM (#14251776)
      Try Australia, or even India. Australia used fully open source voting machines with a paper trail - electronic voting entirely transparent and accountable to the voters. The voting machines where made by a private company using requirements drawn up by an indpendent body. The resulting code was then made available on the internet for full public scutany (and several bugs where found and corrected due to public involvement), and company employees where not allowed anywhere near the machines or the voting - no late "patches", no special "help" from the company on voting day.

      India went simple - in a country where many villages are only accessable by elephant or similar transportation, and where there is a huge population (the electorate alone is over 660 million, more then twice the US popultion), they chose to use voting machines with the simplest of components - no operating systems, no databases, just simple electronics designed to allow an official to release one vote at a time to a voting board (list of candidates with a button beside each one), and then close the unit (no more votes could be cast).

      E-voting isn't the problem, it's American politics. Privatized elections carried out with minimal or no government regulation will give you privatized results - not only have private e-voting companies refused to fix major flaws in their software, made untested and unapproved patches to voting machines hours before elections, but the results from those voting machines have been highly suspect - not just that e-voting districts have been the only ones that are wildly out of line with exit polls, and always in favor of the same party, but instances where outright fraud in favor of that same party is obvious - district e-voting machines reporting impossible numbers like many more votes then actual voters, and often negative votes for a non-republican candidate (i.e. Volusia County whose diebold machines recorded -16,022 votes for the democratic candidate). In Ohio the numbers got as high as -25 million votes for democratic candidates.

      • The basic concept is flawed. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by khasim ( 1285 ) <brandioch.conner@gmail.com> on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @06:42PM (#14251900)
        The "e-voting" concept should be ... the computer prints the ballot and that paper ballot is your vote. That ballot lists ONLY the names you chose. You read that and drop it into the ballot box.

        The computer counts the number of paper ballots it has printed for each candidate. This number can be released to the news agencies. But the real vote is the paper ballot.

        At the end of the day, the names of the voters who used that machine are counted, the paper ballots are counted and both of those are compared to the total number of votes the machine says were cast. If they don't match, there is a problem.

        In case of recount, the paper ballots are hand counted.

        A random number of machines should also be checked against the ballots cast at them.

        Multiple checks.
        • Here in Ireland the govt. tried introduce the typical flawed e-voting (no paper trail). They got away with a trial run in a couple constituencies in one election, but the group they set up to rubber-stamp their use in the following elections came back with an unexpected (for the govt) "you've got to be joking?" We're now stuck spending millions storing the things, and the Minister responsible for wasting millions buying the things in a previous dept. is now in charge of the Dept. of Transport, spending bill
        • A random number of machines should also be checked against the ballots cast at them.

          Multiple checks.

          You got the right idea, but even with that, what's to ensure that you actually have all the paper ballots, or that the ballots haven't been swapped with a different box between the precinct and the county/parish elections office?

          An idea I came up with is to use the "reproducible random" posited by Steven Wolfram in "A New kind of Science" using cellular automata.

          This could be a ground for guaranteeing the pr

          • You got the right idea, but even with that, what's to ensure that you actually have all the paper ballots, or that the ballots haven't been swapped with a different box between the precinct and the county/parish elections office?

            Simple. Have representatives from each party ride along with them.

            You don't trust them, they don't trust you. So each side watches to make sure that the other side doesn't swap anything.

            Not to mention that they'd have to swap the computer and the ballots or else the number of ball

        • How's this for a completely off-the-cuff e-voting specification. It will allow for fast voting, fast counting, and a paper trail in between:

          Computerized voting booth: User inserts a blank pre-printed ballot with one line for each position or proposal. The machine confirms that the ballot is loaded correctly (perhaps a notch in one corner) and displays the setup. (Step 0: blind users are assisted in plugging in headphones and instruction on location and purpose of the controls. Controls should have brai

        • Re:The basic concept is flawed. INDEED (Score:4, Insightful)

          by starm_ ( 573321 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @10:53PM (#14253242)
          Amen The fact that this is such an obvious solution and that it is so trivial to implement is what makes the chosen convoluted, hackable, no-recount alternative so suspicious. What honest and experienced company would chose anything but that easy and elegant solution you describe if not because they want to open the possibility to election fraud??? No amount of electronic tweaking will make the system secure. There is always a weak link. Even if Diebold had the best intention in the world, how can they be sure that a partisant lone coder did not sneake a line of code within I'm sure what are millions of lines, converting say 5% of the votes. This could be done at any point in the chain of programs that handle the votes; from the user interface, to the final tally, through the individual machine databases, the talying computer etc. I have programed plenty and I can tell you that, it would be very easy to implement the "bug" so that it happens ONLY on the day of the election and previous and following tests show no bias. a paper trail is necessary!

      • Re:hmm (Score:4, Informative)

        by Kenshin ( 43036 ) <.kenshin. .at. .lunarworks.ca.> on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @06:56PM (#14251998) Homepage
        The recent municipal elections in Ontario used optical recognition to collect ballots. You'd fill-in the boxes next to your choices, and the ballot would be fed into something that looked like a cross between a vault and a photcopier.

        Paper trail AND electronic tallying.

        The recent Canadian federal elections just used plain old paper and pencil technology. Simple, effective, and tallied within the night.
        • American's are to stupid to use paper. We need idiot proof voting. heck we need idiot proof politicians. or at least non idiots running.

      • ... which makes me wonder, why doesn't the USA use the same (open source, australian or indian) voting software for their elections?

        • Re:hmm (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Bun ( 34387 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @09:01PM (#14252731)
          ... which makes me wonder, why doesn't the USA use the same (open source, australian or indian) voting software for their elections?

          Because the Republicans couldn't then go and rig the election? *ducks*

      • Re:hmm (Score:2, Informative)

        by Sathias ( 884801 )
        Australia used fully open source voting machines with a paper trail - electronic voting entirely transparent and accountable to the voters. I'm Australian, and every election I have voted in has been the traditional paper method. I think I might be confused with someone else.

        • Re:hmm (Score:3, Informative)

          by swmccracken ( 106576 )
          No, you've not been entirely confused. The catch is that not all of Australia is involved - this wired article [wired.com] talks about A.C.T. using electronic voting in the federal elections.

          (For other readers: this is only a single one of Australia's eight states and territories, and it's one of the smaller states.)

    • i dont even have faith in the system when votes are done by hand, much less so in digitizing it.

      The trouble comes in throwing out the paper altogether. There has to be a way for an untrained human to look at a ballot and know what it says. The voting machines should just be more accurate at producing the ballot, which a voter then examines and puts in the box. Maybe they have to put it in the box once it's printed, or maybe you keep a tally of how many people don't.

      Behind the scenes, the votes shou

    • Black Box Voting is complaining that Diebold has no paper trail when counting mail-in paper ballots. [Really - I am not making this up]

      http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/1303 7.html [bbvforums.org]

      "New information obtained by Black Box Voting investigator Jim March shows that mail-in votes in upcoming Nov. 8 elections will lack crucial safeguards. The Diebold "GEMS defect" -- the ability for anyone with access to change vote results on the "mother ship" that tallies and controls election results -- has now

      • actually no. There is no proof in tampering/removal of the mail-ins vs what was counted by the machine. Scenario.

        Feed in Ballots...
        Find out Canidate X lost by 450 votes.
        Alter Machine Total via documented exploit.
        'Loose' 451 Cadidate Y mail in ballots.

        Where the tape shows how many were read-in vs how many are present.

    • Re:hmm (Score:3, Insightful)

      by nihilistcanada ( 698105 )
      I do not understand why any computer voting machines are needed? Here up in Canada we manage to have free and fair elections using nothing more sophisticated than paper and pen. This system scales as easy as any other and does not allow any system wide shenanigans at all. We run it all with dedicated non-partisan civil servants and volunteers. It is simple and works.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @05:50PM (#14251416)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Actually the shareprice went up, rendering your (fictional)put options worthless. The resignation of their CEO was welcomed by inverstors.
      But hold on to your options, they may have worth when Diebold keeps doing the stupid things they do and investors realise it was not only their CEO that had suffered braindamage after repeated beatings with a clue-by-four. They Use windows and claim their systems are safe and tamperproof. Their 'engineers' should be stripped of their title and engineers badge too! oh wait

  • good riddance (Score:5, Insightful)

    by the arbiter ( 696473 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @05:51PM (#14251429)
    Boy, is this long overdue. This man bears a lot of responsibility for the current lack of confidence in the legitimacy of our elected officials and elections.

    Whether or not you believe that elections in this country were stolen, you must admit that Diebold's response to questions about the security of their machines and software have, to put it mildly, not been helpful.

  • Oh look... (Score:5, Funny)

    by digitallystoned ( 770225 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @05:52PM (#14251441) Homepage
    another contract for Haliburton to take over.

  • two links (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @05:52PM (#14251445)
    We geeks need to contribute to the open source voting software efforts!!

    There are only two very early stage projects for the US market:

    http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/ [openvotingconsortium.org]

    http://www.softimp.com.au/index.php?id=evacs [softimp.com.au]

    I'm trying to help out openvotingconsortium.org and am reading up on the other one which I just found out about.

    What are you doing??
    • Actually eVACS [softimp.com.au] is in active use. It is production quality product with full security review by at least one security group (and anyone can - it is open source).

      This open-source system was developed by a number of well known names in the open source community - including - Andrew Tridgell (Samba), Martin Pool (Apache), and Rusty Russell (ip-tables / netfilter).

      All elections for the ACT government in Australia are now run using this system. Votes are lodged either at an eVACS terminal or - if lodged on pa

  • Working in the software business I can tell you customers expect the world from software but aren't willing to pay for it. The blame belongs to the customer (i.e. the government) for accepting lowest bidder contracts instead of the software developers. Sometimes paying less costs more than doing it right the first time. Your tax dollars at work, folks.

    • Re:The customer is not always right (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @05:56PM (#14251483) Journal
      Or how about the CEO being close friends to Dick Cheney and a top republican supporter while his competitors supported both parties instead?

      The bush administration typically punishes those who give to the democrats and rewards those who give to the republicans. Price is irrelivant and only the lobbying effort counts to get government contracts.

  • He's served his purpose (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Marxist Hacker 42 ( 638312 ) * <seebert42@gmail.com> on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @05:52PM (#14251449) Homepage Journal
    He delivered Ohio to Bush, as promised.

  • 'Nuff said (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @05:54PM (#14251460)
    The head of Diebold is also a top fundraiser for President Bush's re-election. In a recent fund-raising letter Diebold's chief executive Walden O'Dell said he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

    'Nuff said.

  • is it just me... (Score:3, Funny)

    by cyberbob2010 ( 312049 ) <cyberbob2010@techie.com> on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @05:56PM (#14251477) Homepage Journal
    ..or does someone not like Diebold?

  • All together now:

    Ding, dong, the witch is dead.

    Damien

  • I'm curious... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Saxophonist ( 937341 )
    Many of us know from experience that lots of users cannot figure out what seem to us to be rather simple computer interfaces. And, we've probably all encountered people who will not use a computer. Many of these folks tend to be older; I know several of them.

    Now, if people in Florida in 2000 couldn't figure out the "butterfly ballot" (yes, a needlessly convoluted "interface" if you will, but not really all that tough), how do you think people are going to figure out a voting machine? Am I making too much

    • Re:I'm curious... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by geekoid ( 135745 )
      " Many of us know from experience that lots of users cannot figure out what seem to us to be rather simple computer interfaces."

      perhaps the intefaces arn't as simple as we believe?
      Just becasue we can use them only means we've been trained, not that they are simple.

    • Here's a picture:
      http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/americas/2000/ us_elections/glossary/a-b/1037172.stm [bbc.co.uk]
      So, if the pages were not perfectly aligned, you would end up voting for someone you didn't want to.

      A computer interface would be simple to do. Primarily because only an IDIOT would want one that didn't generate a paper trail.

      The paper trail should be the ballot and it should be very clearly printed with the name of the candidate you voted for.

      The computers are just to make choosing and counting easier.
      • Wow, that's so difficult. So, some people could not figure out how to punch the hole where the BIG freakin arrow was pointing to! These same idiots will manage to screw up any kind of voting system created. Maybe they just aren't smart enough to choose their own leaders.

        Misalignment of the ballot and the holes would cause problems regardless of the ballot design. That's why there are holes at the top and the bottom which secure the ballot to the holder via pegs. This prevents a misalignment, so long as the

        • No. (Score:2)

          by khasim ( 1285 )

          Misalignment of the ballot and the holes would cause problems regardless of the ballot design.

          No. The simple solution is to not use holes. Have the name of the candidate and the party printed on the ballot when that ballot is cast. That way there's no question of voting incorrectly.

          That's why there are holes at the top and the bottom which secure the ballot to the holder via pegs. This prevents a misalignment, so long as the user follows the instructions to press the ballot down over the pegs.

          Unless tho

  • Oh, what a beautiful symbol it is though!

    The downside as I see it is that there’s an excellent chance that in the long run Diebold will be depicted as a good company that was badly run for a while by one bad man, but once he left, returned to goodness. This would make his resignation, ironically enough, a setback for that vanishingly small minority of us who care deeply about the legitimacy of our nation’s electoral process.

    But hey, I’d love to be wrong about this.

  • Time for the tin foil hat? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DarkBlackFox ( 643814 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @06:05PM (#14251558)
    I'm not generally a conspiracy theorist, but given all the contraversy over Diebold's products, and if their board of directors is aware of of said contraversy, could this just be a feel good measure to divert public attention from the real issues? So the CEO is resigning due to "personal reasons", but is the company really going to change, or is it more of a "See? The Bad Guy(TM) is gone, you can trust us now!" type deal.

  • Out of the office (Score:3, Funny)

    by sinij ( 911942 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @06:07PM (#14251573)
    Somehow I don't think he was VOTED out of his office.

  • It may already be too late (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pHatidic ( 163975 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @06:11PM (#14251625)
    Anyone who knows anything about business knows the cardinal rule: A people recruit A people, B people recruit C people. The CEO of Diebold was an F person and it's likely the whole company is now filled killers, thieves, and lawyers.

  • So, move to Delaware. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Medievalist ( 16032 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @06:15PM (#14251661)

    We've had electronic voting booths [verifiedvoting.org] for ages (we had incredibly complex mechanical ones [shoupvote.com] until the old clockmakers that built them for us all died or retired).

    But we still haven't had any election fraud attributable to the machines.

    Basically, it's because we have so few electors our votes aren't worth stealing. :(

    • Re:So, move to Delaware. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by pz ( 113803 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @07:42PM (#14252291) Journal
      I've often heard the arguments that we should go away from the current generation of mechanical voting machines because (a) they're old and breaking down and no one understands how to repair them, and (b) they're old and breaking down and spare parts aren't available. These arguments are quickly followed by statements of how much better electronic voting would be.

      I don't believe it for a second. I'm not sure who is trying to pull a fast one (perhaps Diebold is the answer in the US), but someone is planting FUD in no uncertain way.

      Please, seriously, someone make a cogent argument that for the millions of dollars that a contract to make electronic voting machines would cost, spare parts could not be designed and manufactured de novo for these mechanical ones. Someone tell me that we couldn't make it worthwhile to train people on how to fix them with those same millions of dollars. Just because a machine no longer has someone to tend it does not mean it becomes an untrustworthy impenetrable black box -- it means we have an opportunity to educate someone, perhaps many people, to a vital and important skill. Aftermarket spare parts are still being made for air-cooled VW Beetles, often to better specs than the originals. And we can't remanufacture our current mechanical voting machines which have worked for decades? Are voting machines somehow so much more complex than car engines? Someone's trying to trick us.
  • "In today's news, Diebold announced that they would be pulling out of Carolina. A frustrated Carolina could not be reached for comment."

  • Can we get a paper receipt now? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Ken Broadfoot ( 3675 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @06:26PM (#14251765) Homepage Journal
    Can the impossible be done and have this machines produce a paper trail now?

    Thank the gods of real democracy this guy is gone.

    I still want him indicted though...

    --ken

  • What I don't understand is ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Empty Yo ( 828138 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @06:38PM (#14251876)
    why the company's machines were even used in the first place. The minute he announced his very partisan feelings on the election, his machines should have been instantly pulled as suspect. It should have been up to Diebold to prove they were secure and accurate instead of up to the public to prove that they weren't.

  • So we ARE NOT going to be using diebold (Score:3, Funny)

    by Rooked_One ( 591287 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @06:42PM (#14251899) Journal
    machines this time right? I mean, after all this has gone on, surely the government would find another contracter whom voting source was open, right?

  • Diebold also makes ATMs (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Diebold is a major manufacturer of ATMs. If they're so terrible at security, I guess I'll think twice before inserting my ATM card into one of their machines.

  • The problem is more than just one guy... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dtjohnson ( 102237 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @06:57PM (#14252001)
    Just getting rid of the Diebold CEO does not fix the problem because the problem is the *system* rather than just one man. It is the system that allows one company to submit voting systems for use by the public with no oversight of their accuracy and integrity and it is the system that enables corrupt elected officials to allow Diebold to do as it pleased. The next Diebold CEO might be worse than the last one. Even worse, there will likely be other diebold-like companies springing forth to provide similar voting systems. Until the American public are able to throw off their cloak of indifference, timidity and cowardice and stand up to the Diebolds in their local jurisdictions, the system will remain broken.

  • What is the US Secret Service doing? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @08:03PM (#14252434)
    What is the US Secret Service doing?

    It is supposedly their responsibility to see that election fraud doesn't happen, yet the evidence of fraud is clear as a day.

    Why? Are americans happy with this?

    http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Diebold_insider__all eges_company_plagued_1206.html [rawstory.com]

    Shortly before the election, ten days to two weeks, we were told that the date in the machine was malfunctioning, the source recalled. So we were told 'Apply this patch in a big rush. Later, the Diebold insider learned that the patches were never certified by the state of Georgia, as required by law.

    Also, the clock inside the system was not fixed, said the insider. Its legendary how strange the outcome was; they ended up having the first Republican governor in who knows when and also strange outcomes in other races. I can say that the counties I worked in were heavily Democratic and elected a Republican. ...

  • Resignation is not enough (Score:3, Insightful)

    by beforewisdom ( 729725 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @08:55PM (#14252704)
    Resignation is not enough, I want prosecution

  • Sorry to break the news... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by guygee ( 453727 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @10:31PM (#14253147)

    to the "true believers" that remain among my fellow Americans, but firing Walden W. O'Dell will not automagically bring back integrity to the voting system here in the U.S. Most slashdotters are savvy enough to know that paperless voting using secret, proprietary code can be easily manipulated. We will not be safe from this type of fraud until paperless voting is outlawed in ALL states.

    Also, many slashdotters have knowledge of the "Law of Large Numbers", and know that a well-designed exit poll should be accurate within its designed level of confidence. Large statistical "anomalies" between exit polling and "recorded votes" associated with the 2002 (Georgia, Minnesota), 2004 (Presidential election, many states) and 2005 (Ohio referendums) verge on the quasi-impossible, until you factor in deliberate fraud. Exit polls do not lie, and when the margin of error is exceeded time and again, all with identical bias, we can be sure that the system is being gamed. Exit polls, after all, are how the fairness of elections is assessed in those "corrupt, third-world" countries.

    At least be comforted the "powers that be" that really control the country still feel the need to throw us dogs the "bones" of legitimacy. In the words of Frank Zappa,

    "The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see a brick wall at the back of the theater."

  • To Diebold or not to .. (Score:3, Funny)

    by freaker_TuC ( 7632 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @01:07AM (#14253894) Homepage Journal
    ... To Diebold or not to Diebold, that is the question ... ... the answer is 42

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