Today is a major primary election in several U.S. states. In Maryland, it will be the first use of the controversial new Diebold e-voting machines that were the subject of several negative security evaluations.
Unless there are very large, obvious problems today, expect stories later in the week in which e-voting advocates say there were no problems with the new machines. What they will really mean, of course, is that they didn’t notice any problems, which isn’t too surprising since the machines are essentially black boxes.
Avi Rubin, a prominent computer security expert and e-voting critic, is working as a volunteer election judge in Maryland. I’m eager to hear what he has to say after spending a day in the trenches.
By the way Diebold recently raised around 200,000 for the Bush 04 campaign at one of those thousand something dollar plate dinners. No paper trail no evidence.
There is an interesting news snip caught by the website arstechnica.com about e-voting, where two different reporters are interviewing Maryland’s election administrator, and receive two very different answers about wether e-voting worked or not.
The news snip is here.
I’m just a sample of one, but I got turned away from the polls this morning in California (San Diego) because none of the machines were working at my polling place. I was told to come back later in the day. Why isn’t Jesse Jackson protesting my disenfranchisement.
San Diego has shiny new Diebold machines. It’ll be interesting to see how many elections go by before the results are challenged.
California is using Diebold machines for the first time in many precincts as well.