gaithersblog.net

As I previously posted about in some detail here and, more briefly here, there will be a joint public hearing of the Mayor and Council and the Planning Commission on Monday, November 6 2006 at 7:30pm, to discuss the recently-published schematic development plan for Crown Farm, SDP-06-005. The City has published a legal notice here, and the SDP documents can be found here. The remainder of that night’s agenda remains unpublished except for the advance notice described here.

Melissa Harris writes in the Baltimore Sun,

Diebold Election Systems shipped Maryland flawed electronic voting machines that were used in the 2004 election, then quietly replaced the malfunctioning components last year, documents and interviews show.

Gilles W. Burger, chairman of the State Board of Elections, said this week that he and fellow members were initially told that Diebold was performing a “technical refresher” of the voting machines during July and August last year. He later learned that the refresher was really the repair of a flaw discovered by Diebold about three years earlier but not disclosed to him and other board members. The “motherboard” of each unit - the main circuit board that holds all of the machine’s critical parts - had a glitch that could cause the machines to freeze.

According to an internal Diebold e-mail, the company stopped production of the voting machines on March 11, 2002, after reports that the units - the same kind that were delivered to Maryland that year for use in four counties - were malfunctioning.

“Our preliminary assessment is that this may be caused by motherboard-related issues, such as machine freezing up, start-up error that yields machine lockup, and machine self-rebooting,” wrote Cindy Hartzell, a Diebold employee.

In response, another employee wrote: “What about the units that have already been shipped to customers?” referring specifically to counties in Tennessee and Kansas.

Mike Morrill, a spokesman for Diebold in Maryland, said the company stopped production to fix the problem, then tested every motherboard when assembly was restarted. Maryland, however, was not notified at the time.

In my mind, this also brings up questions about accountability, and control over the equipment that is used in an election. How can we trust this equipment if we don’t even know what is being put in it and why?

And of course, who knows whether the equipment will work properly this year. Avi Rubin reports that the current equipment exhibits problems even during training:

Maryland is providing additional training to chief judges for the November 7 election. Here is an excerpt from an email I received yesterday from one of the two chief judges from my precinct during the primary, and who will serve as chief judge again in the general election (posting this with her permission).

“I wish you could have been with [us] on Saturday when we ‘retrained’. There was a Diebold representative there demonstrating the machine and guess what. It malfunctioned! Nothing too bad though. She was trying to cancel the ballot and the machine said it had been inactive and started to shut down.”

Why is anyone still using Diebold’s stuff?

The Washington Post also has a story on the 2004 problem, for what that’s worth.