Partisan goals undermine faith in vote machine

Editorial, Baltimore Sun
January 12, 2004

Let me see if I understand correctly. The column "How safe is your vote?" (Opinion Commentary, Jan. 7), mentioned that the CEO of Diebold Election Systems has written in a letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."

As has also been extensively reported, all elections in Maryland will soon be conducted on machines purchased from Diebold that leave no paper trail or any other means of verification of the vote and which run on software that nobody but a few employees of Diebold has ever seen.

Yet in the same feature, the chairman of the Maryland State Board of Elections assures the public that these machines can be trusted.

OK, there you lose me.

The state is buying voting machines that run on software that we've never examined, from a company whose CEO is on record as being committed to delivering votes, and I'm supposed to trust the results? That's not going to happen.

I've written enough software myself to know that this situation is nothing short of an obscenity.

The state assures me that the machines have been "successful" in two elections in four counties and a host of Maryland cities. That's an interesting, but unsupportable, conclusion since these machines left no paper trail from which the validity of the results could have been determined; the evidence of success seems to be simply that the outcomes were uncontested.

If you wish to be sure that your vote isn't going to be "delivered" in our coming elections using touch-screen machines, you have no choice but to use an absentee ballot.

John Sorge, Betterton

© 2004 Baltimore Sun