I recently talked with a poll worker who worked the early voting setup the county provided prior to the recent florida primary. I was stunned to learn that touchscreen voting machines were being offered as supplements to the normal process of voting using optical mark-sense systems. I went to our Supervisor of Elections website to confirm this tale and disocvered that indeed, our county rolled out the use of touchscreen electronic voting systems. In particular, it seems they chose the Diebold TSX model.
You can't even begin to understand how concerned I am that our county is doing business with Diebold. When you google for "Diebold TSX" the very first page of results is filled with reports of Diebold TSX security problems, hackings and bannings by state election offices. It also turns up reports of misdeeds by the firm in order to sell its products here in Florida.
Here are some quick examples;
http://www.ss.ca.gov/executive/press_releases/2004/04_030.pdf#search=%22diebold%20tsx%22
http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=350&Itemid=51
http://www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org/article.php?id=6324
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVtsxstudy.pdf#search=%22diebold%20tsx%22
This is scary stuff. In general, the lack of a paper trail for accountability, and the talk of vulnerabilities in the vote storage mechanism make me extremely uncomfortable with the use of these machines in our county.
Signed....Concerned Voter
P.S. This is what I should be sending to the newspaper and the Supervisor of Elections....~Steve>
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