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Tuesday, April 4, 2006

It ain't democracy, but it does start with a D

This morning, I walked on over and voted.

The new Diebold touch-screen machine was not working yet at my polling place, so I filled in the bubbles on a piece of paper and then fed it in to another Diebold machine, which read the votes.

As the machine sucked in my ballot, one of the election judges commented, "It's working good now. We had a lot of problems with it earlier."

"What kind of problems?" I asked.

"We had a lot of problems with it earlier." That was all the response I got.

Remind me why we are using these machines?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

^So the votes will always show the desired outcome.

Michael M. said...

"Diebold machine, which read the votes." Let us hope it did, anyway.

We are using electronic voting machines because they are required by HAVA to get funding. Why Diebold as opposed to Sequoia or one of the other companies? I was troubled. As hard as it is to believe, Diebold may have been a better choice than any of the others. Edward Martin of the Board of Elections seemed very aware of Diebold's problems when we corresponded. Local election boards were placed in a difficult situation.