John Cole, over at Balloon Juice, has been watching the back-and-forth over the 2004 Ohio results between Jim Lampley and Byron York at the Huffington Post, and utterly destroys Lampley by linking to one article (from the Ohio Democratic Party website, no less) that kicks the legs out from under Lampley's fatuous argument. Lampley is obviously fighting out of his weight class (to continue his tired boxing analogy). Cole is a heavyweight, and Lampley is a flyweight (and that's with Arianna putting a foot on the scale to give him some heft).

Lampley drags up Diebold's founder and his statement that he would do everything possible to deliver Ohio (his home state) to Bush in 2004. He drags out the Buried Donk fabulism that Diebold machines are programmed to overcount votes for Republicans(which is false, but never mind that). Ergo, Kerry actually won Ohio.

Except that not a single voter in Ohio used a Diebold machine, or any type of electronic voting without a paper trail. Diebold machines are not certified in Ohio. That fact is noted in the ODP press release.

Oops.

posted on May 12, 2005 06:40 PM



Comments:

ES&S, which is run by the CEO of Diebold's brother, has a lot of machines in Ohio. That's not much of a stretch.

posted by Kimmitt on May 16, 2005 12:39 PM

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The ES&S machines have a paper record, which allows for complete auditing of the votes. Additionally, those machines passed Ohio's testing regime, unlike the Diebold machines.

posted by timekeeper on May 16, 2005 01:57 PM

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The ES&S machines have a paper record of whatever was saved to the hard drive (or other media). They do not have a user-verified paper record, which means that they are useless in that regard.

To put it another way, you can vote, and an ES&S machine can completely change your vote, then print out the record and drop it in the bin. You have no way of knowing if that happened. This, again, is not conducive to confidence in the system.

posted by Kimmitt on May 17, 2005 10:34 AM

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