hey, how come we haven’t developed the sequoia story? the moonbats cry DIEBOLD, but diebold machines have only been supposed to be hackable. all actuall incidents of machine failure have been from these smartmatic/sequoia machines.

now, there’s probably something to look into there, but as it stands, the part about the venezuelan government owning these machines is a little truther.

but the fact is that these machines have been brought in by democrats under the dubious auspices of them leaving a “paper trail”.

this was how it seemed to evolve: of the four companies providing electronic voting systems, a beef is raised specifically with diebold, which is alleged to be owned by republicans. the ruckus kicked up by these “black box voting” truthers begs the question, if punchcards are untrustable and electronic voting is untrustable, then what are the really demanding? the answer to this is the repeated refrain that electronic voting must be made trustworthy and that diebold machines don’t leave a “papertrail”.

the “papertrail” thing was really repeated ad nauseum. it became a stock description of diebold’s machines: “…machines which do not leave a papertrail…”

guess who’s machines “leave a paper trail?” sequoia/smartmatic machines do, and this very distinction was emphasised by cook county clerk, david orr, when he brought these machines to chicago.

now, these machines take a shit when it comes time to consolidate the totals and send them off for tabulation. they’re broken. chicago and santa cruz had similar experiences — with punchcards, chicago had 95% of its votes for the 2004 general election tabulated that night. using sequoia machines, for the 2006 primaries, it was more than a month before tallies were in. races flipped in the process. when the people of cook county sought an explaination, the poll-workers were blamed. BUT THEY LEAVE A “PAPER TRAIL”!

the “paper trail” is a red herring to begin with. the machines spit out a reciept and a tape. the reciepts are useless of course. how many people are prone to hold onto those things longer than they hold onto their atm reciepts? if the reciepts are called in, how many of those few who hold onto them will in fact send them in and what use would they be in verifying a result? secondly, the “papertrail” doesn’t alleviate the hyped up concerns raised by the black box truthers. the black box truthers spent the last couple years trying to prove that diebold’s machines could be hacked. though it is denied for credibility’s sake, they were trying to prove that the certified result of the 2004 election could have been the result of republicans secretly rigging machines in democratic strongholds. they finally cracked it after two years of study. the process involves flipping the machine over, removing a dozen screws, removing parts and replacing them, etc.. you know – so discrete no one would notice a thing! but since no diebold-related f-ups could be discovered, the black box truthers had to go the extra mile. the software hack they installed in their demonstration registered a fake vote while displaying a fake vote which matched the users actual selection. what can be sent to a display can be sent to a printer. in other words, in the tortured analysis presented by the black box truthers, machines which provide a “paper trail” are no more secure than diebold’s machines.

yet all we ever hear of is diebold, while other brands of evs are brought in on the basis of their un-diebold-ness, though these machines malfunction and their chains of ownership are a great deal more suspect.

the left doesn’t need exceptional circumstances to provide them pretense to attack our democratic institutions. in 2000 they spun doubt from a system wherein one registers their vote by gripping a metal rod and physically punching a hole through a piece of 60lb cardstock. its worth it to investigate the “DIEBOLD” screechers claims as possibly an offensive, as opposed to defensive, movement.

jummy on October 20, 2006 at 5:42 PM