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« Googlespooked | Main | Crimson plagiarism, redux? » Monday, October 30, 2006Diebold and election oversightI wrote here a month ago about a Princeton research group's discovery of flaws in touch-screen voting machines made by Diebold that are to be widely used in next week's election. The machine they tested is to be used in every county in Maryland. Now news has emerged, thanks largely to reporting by the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun -- acting on tips from an organization devoted to vote-security activism -- that Diebold made fixes to thousands of machines in use in Maryland in 2005 to address a problem discovered three years earlier. At issue is whether Diebold properly disclosed these fixes (and the need for them) to state authorities, who made some indignant comments to reporters about "the level of contractor oversight that Diebold requires." Diebold officials claim that all repairs on their machines were properly communicated. A tangential thought that occurs to me: Why is it that elections are handled (nationwide?) by county governments, which are often underfunded and operate in a continual state of jurisdictional confusion? Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:41 AM
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