Wait. Are we arguing about the touchscreen system and what modifications (if any) are necessary to bring it up to snuff (if it can be) or are we arguing about disqualifying one potential touch-screen vendor because of the politics of its senior managment?
Both.
The. Staff. The. Paid. Staff. The people who put together the RFPs, who evaluate the vendors, who collect the machines from the state police (or whoever) after the polls close.
I’ll do that. Because you’re right. Democrats have never engaged in a scheme in which poll workers used low-tech or no-tech means to move an election result.
Congratulations. You’ve now proven that you’re not really Roger_Chicago and leveled a cheap shot to boot. One more for the hat trick.
In that case:
I think the nation’s election commissions are failing to realize how big a pickle they’re in, that neither they nor the governors and legislatures who charge them with their missions understand how counting large numbers works and that touch-screen voting systems are exactly as flawed as all the other single-solution systems that have been proposed, and that in any event the electorate to which all of them answer understands even less. The Bush/Gore mess, which should have put a marvelous, illuminating spotlight on the problem instead confused things all the more.
This is one of the few areas where I think substantially more government money needs to be spent, but I doubt it will be because no one in power (or out, for that matter) directly benefits from the expenditure.
Don’t have a good solution for you, unless it’s making me the uber-election commissioner for a few years and giving me a big honkin’ budget. I’ll work cheap.
The paid staff are probably members of AFSCME, so what? Do you have any evidence that Democrats used low or no-tech means to rig elections, other than your innuendo that AFSCME is pro-democratic and therefore might stuff the ballot box? What the hell is your last comment supposed to mean? I am not Roger_Chicago, I am Roger_Mexico, who is a character from Gravity’s Rainbow. I guess you are trying to make some veiled reference to the myth that Kennedy stole the 1960 election from Nixon. It wasn’t all that close, the electoral vote was 303 to 219. Nixon did recounts in a number of states and only succeeded in getting Hawaii’s 3 votes back into the Kennedy column. There were the 15 faithless electors who voted for Harry Byrd. There was some folks in Chicago who “cooked” the results but it wasn’t enough to throw the election. Besides, that was 43 years ago and I think you should move on, like the rest of the nation.
As far as I have been able to determine, the Diebold system offers none of these safeguards. And weren’t exit polls banned after the 2000 Presidential Elections?
Since you failed to specify why you felt the cite was improper, and had to resort to cheap name-calling instead, perhaps we should ask what your agenda is, and how much bias you’re bringing to the table. :rolleyes:
I think all he’s saying is that one can cook the books without a computerized voting machine. You can move on, but you should never forget that it can happen. That’s how you get better returns, learn from the past.
WRT the election oddities, they happen all the time, that cite doesn’t show any evidence that there was tampering. There was evidence of inaccuracies in the tally that affected BOTH parties. The Diebold machines may be crap, but that’s not automatically some kind of consipiracy to elect Republicans.
It’s always useful to apply the Shoe on the Other Foot test. Imagine it’s November, 2008 and Jeb Bush is leading Hillary Clinton by a comfortable margin in the polls. On election day, Hillary wins in a landslide. Investigations turn up the startling evidence that the Livebold touch screen voting machines used nationwide in the election are owned by a company whose officers are all Democrats and donated heavily to her campaign and the Rose Law Firm did pro bono legal work for them back in the 70s. Better put on your ear plugs.
Not in their standard product, but they can be upgraded to comply with an RFP. More worrisome (to me, at least) than the upgradability of the system is its security flaws; if I were the elections commissioner, I’d be inclined to eliminate Diebold simply because they use a Windows platform and the public internet. Let them adapt the proprietary frame relay stuff they use for the ATMs and then we’ll talk. Tell them to be prepared to make some concessions on revealing their source code.
But, of course, that was not your OP, was it? Your OP was whether Diebold should be eliminated as a potential vendor because of the senior management’s political activity. Go ahead, you can check it yourself with your scroll bar.
No.
I’ll take that as a “no,” since the webpage has a direct link to a story with the tantalizing headline “Diebold Responds to Johns Hopkins Professor’s Disclosure of Relationship With Voting Industry Competitor.”
You see, the author of the study was on an advisory board for and had options to purchase the equity of a Diebold competitor. No one who really wanted to discuss “conflicts of interest” as you claim you did could possibly have resisted checking that one out.
So what’s my “agenda?” It is to demonstrate, as I have just done, that you did not open this thread with an intent to debate whether political activity among managers is or should be a sufficient reason to disqualify a potential vendor of a voting system, which is what you claimed in the OP. Your intent was to republish some blog you found somewhere and take a cheap partisan shot. You are december.
As to my bias, I am biased in favor of doing a better job of counting in elections. None of the ~140 companies in which I or my affiliates has an investment is in the voting maching business. A few of them are competitors of Diebold’s in their other lines of business, but none materially.
What, you’re claiming that because the author had ties to a Diebold competitor, that automatically renders his findings invalid? Do we simply dismiss the analysis and the security loopholes magically disappear as a result? By your argument, if Linus Torvalds releases a white paper on a new, previously-undiscovered security exploit in Windows 2000, we can “fix” the problem by simply dismissing him as a competitor, yes?
Bullstuff. I have not expressed an opinion one way or another in this thread on whether or not Diebold should withdraw from the bidding, and have found arguments with merit on both sides of the issue. Considering the nationwide rush to modernize voting equiment in time for the 2004 Presidential election, I think this is something that deserves more scrutiny than it has received so far.
And besides, if I were trying to pull a december, my OP should have had a few snarky partisan potshots along the way, such as “Are there any honorable Republicans left with the integrity to denounce this blatant attempt at subverting the election process?” 
Nice to know we agree on something, then. 
Heck, you’re claiming that because a CEO has ties to the GOP, he will lead a massive voter fraud conspiracy. I find it a WHOLE lot easier to believe manhattan’s claim than yours. One man trashing his competitor’s product vs. massive, illegal voter fraud consipiracy lead by a respected, $2B multinational corporation.
I am? From where?
“Does this constitute a conflict of interest? Should Diebold be allowed to continue in the bidding for Ohio’s election upgrade program?”
Nope, don’t see any accusations of massive voter fraud or conspiracy there. Maybe you need to lend me your secret decoder ring or something.
Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins has a clear conflict of interest and should have recused himself from evaluating voting machines. The CEO of Diebold has a clear conflict of interest and Diebold voting machines should be disallowed from the voting process. The great thing about conflicts of interest is that they are about perception, and do not necessarily have to lead to an actual bias or corruption of the process. The perception of bias is damaging enough.
No. I’m claming that a person who believes that a company should be excluded as a potential vendor because of its senior management’s real or perceived conflict of interest would not then cite a study authored by person with an even more serious, direct conflict to bolster his case. At least not a fair-minded person actually interested in debate.
You mean like this thread, where december simply asked a question, as you did in the OP, and then said that both points of view he cited might be right and yet you accused him of “spinning?” Or do you mean like this one where december said that Dick Gephardt should not resign and you opined that “(Oh, wait, it’s a december post. Figures. :rolleyes: )?”
Now, of course, when called on the very same behavior, you’re claiming that you’re just asking questions. Bullshit. You are december.
More conflicts of interest with Diebold and other players in the electronic voting industry:
The Elections Systems Task Force was the major lobbyist for the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). The ESTF’s main purpose was to get congress to foot the bill for e-voting machines ($3.9 billion) and moving the country away from an auditable system, to a system that has no credible auditibility.
The ESTF was comprised of Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, EDS
and Accenture. These companies all have major government contracts, most with the Defense Department.
Accenture bought Election.com from Osan Ltd., a private Saudi Firm.
Election.com, described as a cash-starved company, has never made money, yet two different companies stepped in to rescue it. First the Saudis, then Accenture.
Accenture used to be Andersen Consulting, formally part of Arthur Andersen of Enron fame. According to the Canadian Polaris Institute, Accenture is heavily involved in projects to privatize public services, especially welfare programs in the US, Canada and the EU. The company’s short history is rife with cost overruns and scandals, the most recent being a possible violation of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Accenture’s political contributions (2000-2002) totaled $220,000, with the GOP getting 57%. Soft money contributions were $86,000, with the GOP enjoying a 3:1 advantage in contributions.
One of the members of ITAA’s (Information Technology Association of America) enterprise division board of directors is Ronald J. Knecht, who is also senior VP at Scientific Applications International, Corp. (SAIC). Why is this important? Because SAIC has been hired to assess the security of Diebold’s voting software for the state of Maryland.
So, ITAA is trying to get hired by Diebold et al, to lobby congress and elections officials to buy into e-voting, plus launch a PR campaign to convince the public the machines are safe. At the same time, a member of ITAA is working for the company hired to assure the trustworthiness of the same machines.
Accenture is incorporated in Bermuda as a tax dodge, and as one of the top 100 federal contractors ($279 million in 2001), has been criticized for this. Half the partners in the firm are not U.S. citizens.
Accenture was recently awarded a contract to provide internet voting to the military. Internet voting is the least secure and the most prone to fraud. Accenture refused to reveal how much it was paid for the contract.
http://www.blackboxvoting.com/
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0308/S00174.htm
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/082603Harris/082603harris.html
Well, if you don’t think that voter fraud is a problem here, then why would you want his company excluded? Conflict of interest only matters if there is a reasonable possibility of that conflict affecting the end result.
We all know that the CEO’s of the various voting machine companies probably have some political affiliation. I don’t think you could find one that didn’t.
Sure, all CEOs will have a political affiliation and that is not a problem. The problem arises when the CEO has a political affiliation, his voting machines have huge security flaws, and he announces his intention in delivering the electoral votes of a state to the presidential candidate of his political affiliation. If his political affiliation was democratic, there would be a huge uproar, Oreilly and Hannity, Coulter and Rush would be screaming TREASON! But if his affiliation is Republican, apparently there is no problem, he is just exercising his freedom of speech.
Is that how you set your standards? By how idiots, paranoids and whackos on the other side might reasonably be expected to react? I’ll keep that in mind.
Is that the best you can do? Don’t be so disingenuous, you know those idiots paranoids and whackos set the tone for the political debate and influence a lot of people. Without all those idiots whackos and paranoids (like Richard Mellon Scaife), there would have been no Clinton impeachment.
Forgive me for having entertained the now-disproven notion that you, as a member of this message board, would strive for a higher standard and actually care about the merits of an argument. If it’s any consolation, I shan’t make the mistake again, and I’ll be sure to point out your preference in future debates.