Diebold vs. Porta-Johns

Open Letter to Mike Jacobsen of Diebold:

Two weeks ago I asked John Kerry to pull America out of the water.
http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_15689.shtml

Now I am asking you, Director of Global Communications for Diebold — and the one that I now realize has the real power — to begin to fix America’s reputation that that has been tarnished by Diebold’s poorly designed voting systems, suitable for soiled diapers.

America is in the commode. Reach in. Our hand is up and we are sinking. Objects are flying, splashing all around us. Your voting machines are the Kevlar ( http://www.kevlar.com/ ) to our society. Protect us; un-flush us! Other countries look to our example. Why do you embarrass us so?

Let me rephrase this. Your machines may get banned, recalled, turned into Porta-Johns® ( www.toilets.com ) if you do not get your act together. Save your product line before we return to paper balloting and you lose 100% market share. If you do not know what I am talking about, please rent Steve Martin’s "The Jerk" to to what happend to his Opti-Grab "glasses holder." http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079367/

Your machines have failed us on two levels. They have failed us perceptually, that is, they do not give the APPEARANCE of fair and honest elections and they have failed us empirically. Do we need more evidence than the negative 16,022 votes for Gore in Florida or a negative 25 million in Younstown, Ohio? Why do these things happen in battleground states? Forget states, results only need to be manipulated a dozen or so battleground COUNTIES! This can be done at a rate of 90 seconds per County. Please read REPUBLICAN Chuck Herrin’s website:
http://www.chuckherrin.com/hackthevote.htm
I also authored an article "How to Hack an Election in 90 seconds" for educational (not criminal) purposes.

You requested a retraction of my challenge in the eighth paragraph of my 12/9 "Catch-22 of Voting" article, which we complied with
( http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_16042.shtml ). Here is the retraction:
http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_16087.shtml and I also made the change to:
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/12/con04543.html I have found no stray copies on the internet so we should be ok.

Nevertheless, rather than telling us you had no felon for check fraud in a high-level development position you wanted us to know this person was not the absolute top dog and was only there for a short time. Judging by Enron and Worldcom, we know the top dog doesn’t know what is going on with the company anyway and it does not take long to fudge the numbers. We can trust what CEO’s saaay, right?

So we are to feel better about your voting machines? Some nugget you tossed us. Here are the points you have NO trouble with:

"Naysayers (some voted for Kerry) are eerily quiet and sure aren’t ignoring or laughing at us in the tin foil hat crowd anymore. The light in the tunnel may be an oncoming train and my advice to the lovers of fantasy is to get out of the way. There is just too much evidence to say "we lost, blah, blah, blah." I say, prove the incumbent won! Give us a nugget like Republicans had to wait 5 hours to vote in Stepford County RED TEXAS LAND, or punch card ballots overwhelmingly favored Kerry, or Mitofsky used a new exit polling method that distorted Zogby’s analysis, or that Simon’s early exit poll numbers from CNN were hacked, or another example of late undecideds breaking for the incumbent, or one of the voting machine companies’ CEOs voted for Dukakis, or that an IT programmer at Diebold did NOT have a criminal record in check fraud using computers, or that Palm Beach County has a good reason for withholding "top-secret" election records, or there was a good reason why election officials in Volusia County to come in early to the warehouse - not their election offices — on a Saturday morning after the election, or that Republican Chuck Hagel did not work at a major vote machine manufacturer shortly before winning his congressional seat. Please give us something besides "we won, look at the final vote total." We should be happy the majority felt it necessary to report a vote total at all!"

We would also hope you would worry less about the press and focus your efforts on making your machines at least give the appearance of FAIR and HONEST vote counting. Negative 16,022 votes in Volusia County for Gore, indeed! Negative 25 million in Youngstown, Ohio THIS TIME on an ES&S Votronic voting machine, which was discarded from official results, according to a Nov. 3 report in Youngstown’s Vindicator newspaper
http://www.vindy.com/basic/news/281829446390855.php
I am a human factors professional by training and would welcome a job at Diebold. Putting people like me on his staff would help his public relations image AND increase voters’ confidence.

Moreover, the FBI should focus an investigation on voter suppression and discarded ballots in Ohio (Franklin and Warren counties) while pinpointing electronic vote rigging and hacking in FLORIDA wherever non-paper trail voting machines are located (Broward? Palm Beach?). You, Mike, would not know what one of his programmers put in the code anyway or how easy it is to hack with legal and illegal backdoors. Remember, it only takes a few key battleground counties.... The fact that ANY of Diebold’s IT staff is partisan or has criminal record is a huge red flag, whether they worked one day or 10 years. Did Jeffrey Dean have passwords? Four lines of code could be inserted in one day. Was any of his GES work integrated, migrated? With printers in the precincts these guys would need to be a lot more clever at rigging these machines. Not that they do, but they COULD.

Some people heard my speech today at the State Capitol in Raleigh in which I quote the Grinch regarding my Christmas wish list: "No you may not have printers. They cost over $99 a piece which could add up to $250,000 dollars for your State. Besides the voting machines are infallible so you do not need printers (in the precincts). Merry Christmas.”

Well, turns out the David is beating Goliath after all, in breaking news: Gary Bartlett, Director of North Carolina’s State Board of Elections has suggested that: "North Carolina will become the third state — following Nevada and California — to put printers in precincts." Mr. Bartlett is also receptive to open source coding and wants more state authority in machine selection along with standards and training. Looks like Christmas is coming early!

Telling us the voting machines are infallible has gone down with the Titanic into the "commode o’ fiction." If we are nice, we will pull YOU from the water. Our first meeting for the North Carolina’s new Voting Study Commission examining the voting problems is this tomorrow at 10 am, room 641 in the the State Legislative Office Building. Time to compromise? Got any programmers willing to defend these swiss cheese systems?

Now was that so unreasonable? You should be glad, thus far, we have not YET pushed for complete removal of your machines at the voter level. One scenario indicates that the only machines needed are the op-scan readers to be used by bi-partisan election officials only at the end of the night (like in uncontroversial Canada). The results would be published at precinct level before transmitting to central tabulator. Another option is to return to hand-counting since we end up doing it anyway. However, I believe printers will make us more confident in your current system and keep Diebold’s market position secure if implemented properly.

Then I can get behind King George II and even buy Diebold stock.

So what is it gonna be? Flush or not to flush?

Robin Baneth, M.S., M.A.
Computer Consultant
Raleigh, North Carolina
rbaneth@mindspring.com