The Trouble With E-Ballots

[shraby]

June 28 issue - It's now official: Walden O'Dell is no longer raising funds for George W. Bush. Why should you care? That was Walden O'Dell's attitude last year, when he promised, in his role as rainmaker for Ohio's presidential re-election campaign, to deliver the state to the incumbent. To his surprise, he learned that lots of people did indeed care—once they realized that his day job was running Diebold, a company that makes electronic-voting devices used by millions of voters. So it was prudent for Diebold to adopt a new policy that banned its executives from outside political work, adopted months ago but formally announced just recently.

Unfortunately, Diebold hasn't conceded its bigger problem—that the current generation of computer-voting devices, the ones that many of us will use this November, are flawed by their inability to verify that the voter's choices are actually the ones that count in the final tallies.

In a visit last week to NEWSWEEK, O'Dell, whose company is under increasing pressure as more citizens learn about the details of touch-screen voting (the League of Women Voters just retracted its support of the technology), presented a spirited defense. Introducing himself as "Wally," and accompanied by experienced PR fire-putter-outers, he explained that Diebold, which makes billions in financial devices like bank ATMs, isn't in the voting game solely for lucre (though he'd like to see a profit down the line). It's about patriotism. "In November 2000 we couldn't elect a president," he says. "America had a problem. We could help."

(more)
<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5251284/site/newsweek/site/newsweek/>

[olddem43]

1. If a Bush fund raiser is running Diebold

that should immediately disqualify that company from any role in voting machines. It's not enough that he simply quit raising money for Bush. That's like Cheney quitting Halliburton - meaningless!