Election Countdown "A to Z" (D is for Diebold)

I've decided that out of sheer ambition and a dose of chutzpah, I'm going to do a post every day between now and the election and tie it to a letter of the alphabet. All the posts—in order, from A to Z—will be election and politics oriented.


D is for Diebold

The name Diebold hasn't come up as much during this campaign, but it refers to the troublesome brand of electronic voting machines that caused a ton of controversy in recent years. A 2006 Princeton University test uncovered just how easily the Diebold software could be hacked with a few simple steps.

Diebold has always denied the flaws, and even went so far as to change their name to Premier Election Solutions to shake their soiled brand (Search for Diebold, and it's not easy to find current info--hence the effectiveness of the name change). According to Wikipedia, Premier, along with sister company Election Systems & Software, Inc, tallies 80% of the votes cast in the U.S. (as of 2004). Forbes recently published this unsettling story about how hackable we still are in 2008. It suggested avoiding digital voting machines and just turning in your vote to the county clerk on a paper absentee ballot. Good grief.

D is also for D'oh-Bama. An upcoming Simpsons episode pokes fun at the voting machine debacle that could ensue on November 4th. It was good to see that Homer was at least attempting to vote for change. Though I always pegged him for a Joe 6 Pack.



But forget shady software hacks for a minute—election trouble is surfacing in human form already. The progressive social justice organization ACORN has come under investigation for alleged rampant voter registration fraud. Not a good look for a Democrat leaning group that is trying to get out the vote. Meanwhile, 300 Rensselaer County, New York absentee ballots recently misspelled Barack Obama's name as "Osama." Yeah, no joke. Freudian slip much?