If having a transparent democratic election is your greatest goal, Diebold can be your greatest enemy.

The maker of electronic voting machines is fighting a local Utah clerk with the determination of a company that is trying to prevent any facts from leaking out.

When county clerk Bruce Funk received a batch of 40 Diebold TSx voting machines, he soon became suspicious of the device. Two of the machines failed a first test and had to be shipped back to the manufacturer. Other devices showed defects ranging from paper jams and memory card bay doors that wouldn't close.

As Funk was responsible for the elections in Emery County, he decided to get a second opinion from BlackBoxVoting a non-profit group that is critically following electronic voting. They found that there was a critical memory shortage in seven of the machines that would eat up to 20Mb of the devices' memory. The shortage more importantly left the voting machines with insufficient memory to store a backup file with the election results.

Diebold claimed that the shortage was the result of different fonts being installed on the machines, but BlackBoxVoting quickly dismissed that explanation. Fonts would account for a few 100 Kilobytes, not 20 megs.

The voting machine maker later changed its story to say that it shipped three different models of the voting machines – but didn't account for the memory shortage and inability to store the backup file.

By then however, the company decided to go on the offensive. The third party testing had invalidated the warranty and required the machines to be recertified – at a cost of $40,000.

In a heated debate, Funk offered to resign. But the next day, he decided to fight for his position as an elected official and hired an attorney.

This isn't the first time that the accuracy of Diebold voting machines has been scrutinized. But the company keeps fighting any outside effort to verify the accuracy of its machines. We can only speculate why the company is trying to hide thing from the public.

Tags: Diebold, black box voting, elections, democracy

30 Mar 2006