Maryland Diebold voting machine 'disaster' today

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 2:39 PM on September 13, 2006.

Matt Stoller writes: "[I]f Al Wynn hadn't cheated, he would be giving a concession speech right now." Not only that, but the Washington Post's reporting on Donna Edwards' death was greatly exaggerated:

3.08pm:

4.10pm:

Wynn, a seven-term incumbent has, according to James L., "supported the Bush administration on several crucial votes, including the Bankruptcy Bill and the Iraq War." Edwards is a critic of the War and calls a woman's right to choose "a fundamental human right."

According to Stoller, Wynn received a great deal of shady money toward the end of the campaign and Stoller wonders how many violent tactics from the Wynn campaign (like the one caught on VIDEO) went unreported.

Adding to the Wynn campaign's appearance of impropriety, the Maryland Board of Elections irresponsibly released the early numbers before the unusually high number of provisional ballots (due to the malfunctioning of the Diebold touchscreen machines) had been counted.

Fortunately, Johns Hopkins professor Avi Rubin was a volunteer election judge. Rubin's 2003 report noted that the Diebold Accuvote TS was less than sound:

"[t]he system, as implemented in policy, procedure, and technology, is at high risk of compromise."

Maryland ignored the report and went ahead with the machines. Rubin took careful notes of all malfunctions and incompetence, including the fact that...

... the Diebold rep at Rubin's district had no idea what was going on with the machines as he'd been hired the day before.

Rubin continues:

The first problem we encountered was that two of the voting machine's security tag numbers did not match our records. After a call to the board of elections, we were told to set those aside and not use them.

...

Had I not checked [the outlet] twice, those machines would have died in the middle of the election, most likely in the middle of people voting. I hate to think about how we would have handled that. A couple of hours later, the board of elections informed us that we should use the two voting machines with the mismatched tags, so we added them and used them the rest of the day (!).

...

[A]s time went by, this poll book [the mechanism by which all computers are synched up so voters can't vote twice] was going to fall further and further behind the others, and that if someone signed in on the others, they would be able sign in again on this one and vote again. After a call to the board of elections, we decided to take this one out of commission. This was very unfortunate, because our waiting lines were starting to get very long, and the check-in was the bottleneck. The last few hours of the day, we had a 45 minute to an hour wait, and we had enough machines in service to handle the load, but it was taking people too long to sign in.

Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.