Swarthmore students are defying a cease-and-desist order from Diebold (makers of very flawed electronic voting machines). This controversy hasn’t really made the mainstream news much at all, but it’s an important story. As with most things in government, transparency is essential. Audit trails are a good way to help provide them. These machines don’t have really either.

In this case, leaked memos from Diebold are being hosted on the Swat network. Diebold has been sending out C&D’s to try to get people to pull the memos. A Swarthmore student group is refusing to comply with the C&D, essentially calling Diebold’s hand. I wonder if it will go to court.

An excerpt from the main story:

We have in our possession the internal memoranda of Diebold Elections Systems, the company in charge of the electronic voting machines in 37 states, and we intend to share them. These memos prove that Diebold knowingly produced an electronic election system that contained absolutely no security against voter fraud. In fact, the lead engineer from Diebold wrote over two years ago that anyone could change votes without leaving a trail: “Right now you can open GEMS’ .mdb file with MS-Access, and alter its contents. That includes the audit log.” GEMS stands for Global Election Management System and is the central computer in each county on which the votes are stored after the election.

Diebold has filed cease and desist orders against anyone who has attempted to share these memos with the public. They have taken down hosts all over the world, including the personal website of the very journalist who broke this story, Bev Harris. We refuse to comply. We refuse to allow the suppression of evidence that proves a Diebold machine registered 16,022 negative votes for Al Gore in Precinct 216 in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. We refuse to comply with a company whose CEO has given $9,965 to Bush and the Republican National State Elections Committee since 2001, while declaring that he is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year.”

From the discussion, here are some additional resources and action items:

  • EFF Action page on secure elections - Contains a letter you can send to your Congressman, background information, and info on pending legislation on this very topic (Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003 (HR 2239)).
  • Thomas link for the bill
  • VerifiedVoting.org - site dedicated to this issue with simple explanations of the problems, links to even more info, and action items.