Voting Machine Transparency Costs One County Clerk In Utah.

Sources: ZDNet's Blog, Scoop, and Black Box Voting Forum

It's become pretty apparent that people should NEVER question Diebold. Never ever. Or they may face termination, jail time, or whatever Diebold sees fit.

An Emery County Clerk named Bruce Funk in eastern Utah just found this out after his investigation into some flawed Diebold machines the county order last December.

Huge flaws. Diebold voting machines. Surprise, surprise.

03-18-06: BBV EXCLUSIVE - Diebold TSx touch-screen study (Part I)

Emery County Clerk Bruce Funk has been running elections for 23 years. He was quite content with his optical scan system. The state of Utah thought otherwise: On Dec. 27, Funk took delivery on 40 Diebold TSx touch-screen machines, part of a statewide directive.

"I had concerns about Diebold," says Funk, "but I thought, 'If the state is going to mandate it, then I guess they'll assume responsibility if anything goes wrong.'"

Not so. He soon learned that he will be responsible but the state will decide what election system will count the votes.

Funk's concerns escalated when he heard a particularly unusual statement by Diebold sales rep Dana LaTour.

"Some of you are going to hate my guts on Election Day," she said to the assembly of elections officials. Later, another Diebold representative named Drew was asked what LaTour meant when she said "Some of you are going to hate my guts..."

"We're going to have problems on Election Day, and we're just going to have to work through them," he said.

Just wait...it gets better.

Shortly after Funk received his "brand new" TSx machines, Diebold helped him do acceptance testing. Two of the 40 machines promptly failed the test. Diebold arranged to take them away.

The remaining machines showed several defects -- crooked paper feeds that jam, memory card bay doors that wouldn't close, parts getting stuck, coming loose, falling off.

Funk thought it might be a good idea to take a closer inventory.

He booted each machine up to check the battery. Some of the machines were marked with little yellow dots, and he got to wondering about that, too. He studied the screen messages, and noticed something very odd.

Most machines had about 25 MB of memory available, but some had only 7 MB of free memory left. One had only 4 MB of available memory. For perspective, the backup election file generated by the Diebold TSx is about 7.9 MB. Now why would brand new voting machines have used-up memory?

Gee...I wonder why. The better to rip elections with, my dear!

This prompted Funk to seek an evaluation. He asked Black Box Voting to help him analyze his voting system.

After several consultations, Black Box Voting determined that the nature of the problems in Emery County might be systemic and might be national in scope. Therefore, we arranged for and underwrote the services of Harri Hursti and Security Innovation, Inc.

Neither Funk nor Black Box Voting were prepared for the depth and breadth of the problems discovered.

You need to go here to read the rest of this. It's long, but it's important. They found a lot of interesting problems with Diebold's machines.

In any case, since Bruce was doing what he thought was the right thing to do, he's earned some attention from Diebold. None of it is good.

Meanwhile, things haven't gone well for Bruce Funk. Diebold asserted that he'd broken the warranty of the machines and wants to charge the State $40,000 to "recertify" them. After a heated closed door meeting with State elections officials and the Emery County Commission, Bruce orally resigned his position, but later changed his mind and is going to fight for his job.

As it's been pointed out by other bloggers, who in their right mind wants to vote on these things? Diebold = evil. That's obvious.

Help Bruce fight this. Help him show the county, Utah, and whomever else that we care about this. It's Diebold's fault that they do creepy, naughty crap to their machines to get Bush and his cohorts elected. He shouldn't be harassed when he was only trying to do his damn job. This man cares about voters. Pop off a quick email or something.

Bruce C. Funk - Clerk/Auditor
Fax: (435) 381-5183
95 East Main
Castle Dale, Emery County
Utah 84513
funk@co.emery.ut.us

Tags: [Bruce Funk], [Emery County], [Utah], [Diebold], [Diebold causes problems for county clerk who tried to figure out what was wrong with their machines], [Black Box Voting]