States throw out costly electronic voting machines

[babsbunny]

http://portal.wowway.net/news/read.php?id=16415973&ps=1011&srce=news_class&action=1&lang=en&_LT=UNLC_USNWU00L1_UNEWS

Tuesday, August 19, 2008 4:46 PM EDT
The Associated Press
By DEBORAH HASTINGS AP National Writer

The demise of touch-screen voting has produced a graveyard of expensive corpses: Warehouses stacked with thousands of carefully wrapped voting machines that have been shelved because of doubts about vanishing votes and vulnerability to hackers.

What to do with this high-tech junkyard is a multimillion-dollar question. One manufacturer offered $1 a piece to take back its ATM-like machines. Some states are offering the devices for sale on eBay and craigslist. Others hope to sell their inventories to Third-World countries or salvage them for scrap.

A few more are holding out hope that the machines, some of which were purchased for as much as $5,000, could one day be resurrected.

"We store them very, very carefully in the hopes that someone, someday may decide that we can use them again," said San Diego County Registrar Deborah Seiler, whose jurisdiction spent $25 million on the devices.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. After the disputed 2000 presidential recount, Congress provided more than $3 billion to replace punch card and lever-operated machines. State officials across the country said the new systems would eliminate human error and political tampering.

[grannie4peace]

1. thanks again today, Jesus

[Hekate]

6. Amen, good Lordy. nt

[phantom power]

2. Those "state officials" didn't have their heads screwed on straight.

Voting machines built by private companies, with proprietary hardware and software, with no transparency. Sure, that's a perfect recipe for eliminating human error and tampering.

:eyes:

[Hekate]

7. Too many people in management still think computers are {{{Magic}}}, and they got hustled but good

:argh:

Hekate

[barack the house]

3. Some eco warriro could surely renovate them to a fridge or PC really.

[demodonkey]

4. Well Pennsylvania will still have 7 million voters in 50 counties on paperless machines!

Come to http://www.votePA.us if you want to learn more and help us fight this.

[KamaAina]

5. And just who is this Deborah Seiler? You might well ask.

San Diego's Seiler said she was forced to shrink-wrap 10,200 machines after Secretary of State Debra Bowen banned the devices, saying they were susceptible to fraud.

Seiler disagreed. Like many local election officials, she likes the system just fine. She also is a former employee of the system's manufacturer....

Unlike most of her colleagues, Seiler does not have to spend any of her budget on printing paper ballots. The county's vendor — Premier Elections Solutions Inc., which changed its name from Diebold Election Systems following years of controversy over the reliability of its machines — bears those extra costs.

Now there's an unbiased source for you. Heckuvajob, AP! :sarcasm:

[pansypoo53219]

8. who got the money?

i would demand a refund.