POLIS

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Diebold apologizes for device flaws

Critics of electronic voting and voting

By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER

It is an uncommon day when the nation's second-largest provider of voting systems concedes that its flagship products in California have significant security flaws and that it supplied hundreds of poorly designed electronic-voting devices that disenfranchised voters in the March presidential primary.

Diebold Election Services Inc. president Bob Urosevichadmitted this and more, and apologized "for any embarrassment."

"We were caught. We apologize for that," Urosevich said of the mass failures of devices needed to call up digital ballots. Poll-workers in Alameda and San Diego counties hadn't been trained on ways around their failure, and San Diego County chose not to supply polls with backup paper ballots, crippling the largest rollout of e-voting in the nation on March 2. Unknown thousands of voters were turned away at the polls.

"We're sorry for the inconvenience of the voters," Urosevich said.

"Weren't they actually disenfranchised?" asked Tony Miller, chief counsel to the state's elections division.

After a moment, Urosevich agreed: "Yes, sir."

Flanked by most of California's local elections officials and advocates for the blind and speakers of minority-language, Diebold executives and attorneys pleaded for one more chance.

"There's still not any evidence of electronic voting sys- tems anywhere in this country counting votes inaccurately," said Conny McCormack, the Los Angeles County registrar of voters.

But critics of electronic voting and Diebold said enough is enough.

Seattle journalist and BlackBoxVoting.org leader Bev Harris took a microphone two feet in front of Urosevich and said, "What we have is a company that lies. Yes, I'll say it -- lies."

"You have got to vote them off the island," said Jim March, a Sacramento lobbyist for the right to bear arms and see a paper ballot. March waved an especially harsh state report on Diebold's poor compliance with California election law.

"After this report, doubts will always remain not only about their credibility but their sanity," he said. --Tri-Valley Herald Online

It's so remarkable to see a corporate CEO in a mea culpa at all about anything that, well, it's refreshing. I'll give him that. It's less refreshing that the anti-e-voting crowd comes off as a little nutty, or at least are presented that way.

I'm still processing Bob Woodward's 60 Minutes appearance after watching it for the second time, but the most immediate "actionable intelligence" from Woodward seems to me to be 2 things: 1) When Cheney, Franks, and Rumsfeld went to brief the Saudi ambassador to the US Prince Bandar, they brought with them a top secret war plan map marked "NOFORN," meaning no foreigners are allowed to view its contents; and 2) they are conspiring with a foreign government to influence the outcome of the election by manipulating oil prices.

OK, this is treason, right? I'm not being glib or rhetorical, I'm really asking. I mean, if it's not, what do we call it?

Just for fun, and in the spirit of Paul Ford's The Passivator, I whipped up the Forbidden Words Flagger, 2004 Edition, based on Matt Groening's annual list of forbidden words he reveals through Life In Hell.

Yeah, he does this on January 1st and it's already April, I know. Next year I'll turn it around faster. What do you want from a lunchtime, boredom-induced hack?

In case you haven't been keeping track, the list of Bush administration officials or associates who are liars includes:

• Paul O'Neil, former Treasury Secretary


• Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism czar


• Hans Blix, former chief U.N. weapons inspector


• Don DiLillio, conservative activist


• David Kay, Iraq WMD inspector


• John Dean, Nixon aide


• Air Force General Richard Myers


• George Tenent, CIA director


• Richard Foster, chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid


• General Anthony Zinni, former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff


• Joe Wilson III, former U.S. ambassador


• Sibel Edmonds, former FBI translator

The President and his staff tell a different story on various issues than these folks do, therefore, liars all. Why do they hate America so much?

The Bush Administration is rushing to enlist Japan and other countries in a missile defense shield alliance, the idea being that by having "facts on the ground" -- the defense system itself by the end of the year and widespread international buy-in -- it'll be that much harder for the program's critics to impede its progress. Seems like a sound approach, given that it has more or less worked for Israel and their security wall, but putting aside that for a moment--are they fucking kidding? Given the fact that Condi Rice was scheduled to deliver a pro-missile defense speech on 9/11 which explicitly downplayed the threat of asymmetric terrorist threats and she'll soon have to answer questions about the Administration approach to terrorism under oath to the 9/11 Commission, you'd think the President would, strictly from a political perspective, recognize that Star Wars is for all intents and purposes off the table for at least the duration of the election season. But, you know, it makes a world of sense, as its absolutely typical of an Administration that brazenly pursues its narrow self-interests, flaunting it even.

Regular Polis commenter 'wilson' has pointed us to a brewing scandal surrounding the acquisition of a sports dome in Bridgeview for a Chicago Fire practice facility. NBC 5's Anna Davlantes has done some fine reporting on the story (apparently at some risk to her safety as not-so-thinly veiled threats were hurled at her), which focuses on a man named Steve Reynolds who forced the owner of the dome to sell (using the ol' send some muscle in the form of an ex-felon/ex-cop to do some convincin' technique), and Reynold's wife, who then profited from the sale of the dome to the city of Bridgeview. It's also apparent that Reynolds and the mayor of Bridgeview, Steve Landek, have had business ties in the past. The NBC 5 story links to The Daily Southtown's exhaustive piece on the deal and the background of its players. You know it's going to be a good story when one of the principal's says, "She didn't make nothing! Lies!"

Stanford's Political Friendster combines regular Friendster's innovative six-degrees web technology with regular Friendster's annoying lag times with … politics! Actual, it's pretty fascinating and has a fairly comprehensive inventory of major and minor political entities, from the the Carlyle Group to Ralph Nader to Christopher Hitchens. There's also a cool visualization tool that let's you map the connections between these players; it reminded me of that Flash app from a few years back that mapped out the connections between corporate CEOs. Perfect for both your tin-foil hat and early adopter sets.