May 14, 2007
King County Elections' "Reckless Plan to Buy Diebold's New Ballot Counters"

Jason Osgood at liberal group blog Washblog alerts us to tonight's hearing of the Citizens' Elections Oversight Committee, to take public testimony on the Elections' Office plan to buy new ballot tabulating equipment as part of the planned transition to mail-only voting. Osgood has harsh criticism of the county's "business case" for the new Diebold equipment, calling the plan "reckless". His main points:

1. New tabulators will not yield faster election results. Because you cannot count ballots you have not yet received.
2. Multiple changes to our elections over a short time period, just before a Presidential election, stresses the system and is too risky.
I agree with Osgood.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at May 14, 2007 10:17 AM | Email This
Comments
1. Ron Sims is the leadership we can expect from the public sector. In the public sector there is no real incentive to save money. No real accountability. And no one gets fired for wasting a lot of money on something that's not needed.

King County Elections is all about substituting fancy new buildings and shiny new equipment for what could be had for free. Good, solid, accountable and accurate procedures and election safeguards.

Lance Armstong's famous book was called "It's not about the bike." And at King County Elections, "It's not about the Electronic Voting Machine."

Posted by: Jeff B. on May 14, 2007 10:47 AM
2. Yeah, but you said the exact same things before him.

Posted by: swatter on May 14, 2007 10:48 AM
3.
The State of California has already rejected the Diebold machines.

Among their difficiencies, they use a Jet (Microsoft Access) database to store the tally locally.

This engine has been plagued with bugs and errors that have resulted in votes being lost or manipulated or both.

Since there is no paper trail, you can never guess when Rom Sims is running a "multiply by 2" commmand for the Demo-O-Crat side.

Posted by: John Bailo on May 14, 2007 01:48 PM
4. I wonder if it automatically spits out votes not for Sound Transit Megabucks$$$, and allows teamsters to remark them?

Posted by: GS on May 14, 2007 07:03 PM
Post a comment
Name:


Email Address:


URL:


Comments:


Remember info?