Oakland Tribune Front Page Story on Faulty Diebold and Voting Situation in CA

Voters short changed at the polls
State's rush to use untested electronic machines results in many failures, loss of franchise
By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER

excerpt:

The culprit wasn't a hacker or bribed programmer. The blame lies with elections officials and Diebold Election Systems.

In spite of state rules and purchase contracts requiring the use of well-tested and nationally qualified voting equipment, they chose just days before the March 2 primary to use a Diebold device never tested against Federal Elections Commission standards and never approved by the National Association of State Elections Directors.

It wasn't the first time that voting systems not fully tested or approved were used in California elections. An audit last fall revealed that Diebold had uncertified software running in all 17 counties that it served at the time. State officials also gave one-time approval recently for Diebold's latest touchscreen machine, even though it had not been fully tested and showed potential vote-tabulation "anomalies."

The reason: four counties had spent $35 million on the new machines and wanted to use them Tuesday.

But it took Tuesday's voting problems in Alameda and San Diego counties to expose the ramshackle nature of voting system testing and approval as California and other states rush to embrace electronic voting.

"The whole certification process has become plastic in order to accommodate the fundamental necessity of holding elections. You would bring the state into constitutional crisis if you didn't," said computer scientist David Jefferson, a member of a state task force on touchscreen voting.