VICTORY: DIEBOLD w/DUBIOUS "ELECTRONIC VOTING" DROPS LAWSUITS AGAINST WEBSITES

Diebold Drops Cases Against Internet Sites

In what is seen as a major victory for free speech advocates on the
Internet, the electronic voting company Diebold has agreed not to sue
websites that published leaked company documents that exposed security
flaws in their new voting system. Diebold had threatened to sue
numerous web operators including chapters of the Independent Media
Centers for posting the internal documents. [Archived Democracy Now!
coverage]
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/02/1537209

FOR REFERENCE SEE:

1) Will Bush Backers Manipulate Votes to Deliver GW Another Election? 
As millions of voters prepare to use electronic voting machines for
the first...
Thursday, September 4th, 2003

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/04/159216&mode=thread&tid=25

2)  Can Democracy in America Survive Electronic Voting? Electronic
voting may place the integrity of elections in the unchallenged,...
Thursday, October 30th, 2003

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/30/1624227&mode=thread&tid=25

Voting machines are sold in much the same way as other government
contracts: through intensive lobbying, wining and dining and America's
top three computer voting machine manufacturers - Diebold, Sequoia and
Election Systems and Software (ES&S) are all big Republican donors,
pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into party coffers in the
past few years.

In the most stark case, Diebold's chief executive Walden O'Dell wrote
in a recent political fund-raising letter to Ohio Republicans that he
was "committed to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral votes to the
president next year." Diebold is one of the companies vying to sell
electronic voting machines in Ohio.

But the concerns over electronic voting machines run from the
political to the technical.

Already, malfunctioning software has caused confusion or possibly
faulty vote tallies in races across the country. And a recent study
out from Johns Hopkins researchers says that Diebold machines are
vulnerable to hackers, multiple votes and vote-switching. There isn't
even a paper trail to record votes.

To counter this, New Jersey Congressman Rush Holt introduced a bill in
the House of Representatives called the Voter Confidence and Increased
Accessibility Act. The measure would require all voting machines to
produce an actual paper record by 2004 that voters can view to check
the accuracy of their votes. The paper records can also be used by
election officials to verify votes in the event of a computer
malfunction, hacking, or other irregularity.

[ETC]

FOR MORE SEE

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/30/1624227&mode=thread&tid=25

WITH AUDIO OF INTERVIEWS:

    * Rep. Rush Holt, Democratic Congressman from New Jersey. He is
the author of the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act
which would require voting machines to produce a voter-verified paper
trail.
    * Andrew Gumbel, Los Angeles based reporter the London
Independent. He recently published a 5,000 word expose on electronic
voting titled All the President's Votes

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