Diebold Apparently Kicked Out Of Florida County After Hack Test

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the kick-'em-while-they're-down... dept

We’ve been following various storylines concerning Diebold and how they seemed to be getting much of what they wanted, even in states that were skeptical of Diebold equipment. Not surprisingly, the EFF is suing North Carolina for ignoring their own law that would have required Diebold to hand over source code — this follows the earlier lawsuit that said Diebold had to follow the law — which they refused to do. We avoided posting yesterday’s news that Diebold’s CEO had stepped down, as there wasn’t a clear connection to the technology questions (many people think an SEC fraud investigation may have more to do with it) — and, as CEO, he seems more a target of political attacks, rather than a discussion about the technology issues, which are of a bigger concern to us. However, a more interesting story may be that BlackBoxVoting is claiming the latest series of hack tests in Florida have convinced some election officials there to “never again use Diebold in an election.” The hack test is simply an update on an earlier hack test that was done last summer, showing problems with Diebold’s equipment. Of course, we haven’t seen any other reports confirming this — other than on the BlackBoxVoting site, and they organized the hack test, so there’s some bias. Also, from their description, it looks like just one county official, and not the whole state. Finding one county official who doesn’t like Diebold probably isn’t that difficult. It would be nice to get some independent confirmation on this story — and then see if other election officials start to question their own use of the Diebold machines. At the very least, all of these questions should, once again, make election officials demand more openness from the company — but, so far, Diebold seems to have been able to dodge most of the questions.