From the Anchorage Daily News
The state Division of Elections has refused to turn over its electronic voting files to the Democrats, arguing that the data format belongs to a private company and can't be made public.
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At this point, it's impossible to say whether the correct candidates were declared the winner in all Alaska races from 2004, Brown said.
The private contractor hired to provide Alaska's electronic voting machines is Diebold Election Systems. It has told Alaska officials it owns the "structure of the database" though the data itself is public.
Oooh! secret database structures, I'm impressed. Is that in MS Access?
In a Jan. 6 e-mail, Diebold's lawyer, Charles R. Owen, told Brewster that "the structure of the database file ... is proprietary information."
Perhaps, but it's not secret. Anyone can examine Diebold's format on a Web site set up by activists who have been raising questions about the company, the Alaska Democrats said.
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Diebold has blocked the group's efforts to get election files in California, Colorado and Washington state, March said. But the data format has been released in a Florida county and in Memphis, Tenn., during a challenge of a mayoral election, he said.
Okay, it is not really a secret and only kinda propreitary. So if the information is public, and the database structure is public why go through all of the expense and the risk of alienating customers?
What the state has offered leaves out "the forensic traces we need to figure out what really happened," March said. The Black Box group is helping the Alaska Democratic Party.
"The results from the 2004 election in Alaska just plain look squirrelly," March said.
Well, might explain it. Losing money and customers isn't good but it is better than providing solid evidence of election fraud.
Go read the article, it seems Diebold is willing to go to great lengths to avoid providing any information that its Elections Systems function properly. Most (honest) companies would jump at the chance to demonstrate how well their products function.
Also today, Alternet has an article 'Election Theft Emergency' in which Mark Crispin Miller talks about his book 'Fooled Again' and the number and size of election discrepancies in the 2004 election. There is not a lot of backup information in the article presumably it is in the book. The article does have a link to the Election Incident Reporting System, explore.