Tell me something I don' know about Diebold. Have you heard of David Bear.
Too many canditates are aware of the faults with Diebold so yes Obama will win hands down.
If the state of Maryland needs to do a recount like Florida did in 2000, we will be facing the same controversy as the Sunshine State but this time there will be no paper ballots to actually count.
The controversy over the 2000 presidential election and the recount in Florida that delayed the election’s certification by more than a month inspired the Help Americans Vote Act.
This then led to Maryland being one of a few states to adopt a uniform statewide voting system, switching to direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines.
However, electronic voting has proved at least as controversial nationally as the punch card ballots used in Florida, because with (DRE) voting machines there will be no way for (voters) to know if their votes were recorded as they intended to cast them and there is no way to check the accuracy of the machines or do a true recount.
With the voting machines votes are recorded on a memory card that is inserted in the computer not on the actual hard drive of the computer. Memory cards will only hold the votes temporarily, so if the machines malfunction for any reason and needs to be re-booted the votes that are stored on the memory card will be lost because they have not been stored on the permanent memory of the hard drive.
Avi Rubin has written a blog about his experiences as poll worker in the 2006 election and the problems that DRE voting caused that day.
Avi Rubin's Blog: My day at the polls - Maryland primary '06
So far the State Board of Elections has spent about $241 million dollars on the Diebold voting machines that have no way to verify that your vote will be counted for the candidate you voted for.
You will be voting on blind faith that your votes will not be lost or tampered with.
Blind faith in a machine is not a good thing.
In 2006, Maryland‘s Board of Elections Administrator, Linda Lamone, was featured in a sales brochure for Diebold Elections Systems praising the company’s new ExpressPoll-5000 electronic pollbook.
In 2006 Maryland paid Diebold $18.4 million for 5,000 of the e-pollbook.
Pollbooks are a device to keep track of voter records and registration.
The ExpressPoll is a new Diebold product, separate from Diebold's voting machines, for verifying that voters are in the voter-registration database and thus eligible to vote. It's also used to encode a smartcard that voters place in a Diebold voting machine to cast their ballot.
Lamone has supported Diebold and maintaining that its touch-screen voting machines are secure and reliable. By appearing in the advertising brochure for Diebold, was Lamone doing anything illegal or unethical?
Lamone has drawn harsh criticism for endorsing the machines which were found to have a number of security vulnerabilities’ by a study commissioned by her own state.
Answer this question, why did Maryland spend another $48 million dollars on Diebold again?
References:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01480.html http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/0 ... ne_th.html In 2006 Maryland‘s Board of Elections Administrator, Linda Lamone was featured in a sales brochure for Diebold Elections Systems praising the company’s new ExpressPoll-5000 electronic pollbook.
In 2006 Maryland paid Diebold $18.4 million for 5,000 of the e-pollbooks. Pollbooks are a device to keep track of voter records and registration.
The ExpressPoll is a new Diebold product, separate from Diebold's voting machines, for verifying that voters are in the voter-registration database and thus eligible to vote. It's also used to encode a smartcard that voters place in a Diebold voting machine to cast their ballot.
Lamone has supported Diebold and maintaining that its touch-screen voting machines are secure and reliable. By appearing in the advertising brochure for Diebold was Lamone doing anything illegal or unethical?
Lamone has drawn harsh criticism for endorsing the machines which were found to have a number of security vulnerabilities’ by a study commissioned by her own state.
Answer this question why did Maryland spend another $48 million dollars on Diebold again?
References:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01480.html http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/0 ... ne_th.html We all expect sticker shock when we buy car, but do we expect sticker shock when we vote? Of course not! We all have the right to vote no matter what the cost but why should we to pay so much for a system that costs so much when cheaper alternatives exist?
When you go to cast your vote in the upcoming Presidential elections, I want you to have sticker shock when you use the touch-screen (Diebold, Premier Voting Systems} voting machines. The cost of the machine will not be on a sticker on the side of the machine, because you would probably faint before you could cast your vote.
Here is what you, the taxpayers, have spent so far on the voting machines.
We will have spent over $97.5 million by the time the 2008 elections are complete to purchase and operate touch-screen voting machines. This does not include the $23.3 million we still owe in capital lease costs. Furthermore, the operating costs cannot be projected into the future because the maintenance contract on the touch-screen machines expires soon after the 2008 election. If Maryland retains the equipment, the contract would have to be rebid at that time. The expenses will continue to grow because as the equipment ages it will need more frequent repairs or replacement.
The costs of our touch-screen voting system includes operating and maintenance costs which are substantial, averaging $10.7 million per year for fiscal years 2006-2008
.These costs include maintaining, repairing, storing, transporting, programming, and testing approximately 19,000 machines as well as providing training and technical support for election workers on system that requires increasingly complex and time consuming security procedures to compensate for its numerous inherent vulnerabilities.
Do you have sticker shock yet because here’s more: even if the costs remain the same as our current average, we would spend another $78.5 million in fiscal years 2010-2014.
So far we have spent $199.3 million dollars on the Diebold touch-screen voting machines.
References:
http://www.saveourvotes.org/legislation ... system.pdfhttp://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=23255