Dan Rather expose of Voting Machines & Chads
Fri Sep 14, 2007 at 09:43:52 AM PDT
There is an unbelievable story on HDNet:
Dan Rather - "The Trouble With Touch Screens"
which exposes what I would think is criminal behavior on the part of (1) ES&S iVotronic voting machines and (2) Sequoia punch card ballots in Palm Beach County.
This story first ran on August 14 and I am amazed I haven't seen the story on Daily Kos or on any of my usual blogs. I found the story at The Brad Blog. A decent transcript of the story is at
Transcript of Dan Rather story
There are several stories here. The first is that ES&S knowingly supplied voting machines with terrible quality control produced in the Teletech sweatshop in the shantytowns of Manila.
Some workers came forward to talk to us, but were so afraid of the
factory owner that they would speak only from the shadows.
What was happening inside the plant? According to this employee and
many others exhausted Philippino workers. Rushed production. Poor
quality.
The only testing done was a manual shake test that was done on only a fraction of the machines.
This manual shake-test, would have been a joke at any quality
electronics factory. But Vibar says that even this crude test was only
done on a fraction of the machines. Why? Because, Vibar says,
management didn't want to slow down production. But almost nothing may
have affected the workers- or the machines -- like the crushing heat
and humidity of Manila -- in a factory with only a few air
conditioners, often broken or turned off. Vibar recalls days when the
temperature inside rose to over ninety degrees.
Rather interviews an American election worker who says:
"sir, there-- the bubble-- they're pillowing." " they're
billowing." what does that mean? Pillowing. It means that the surface
of the touch screen, the plastic or Mylar surface, was not stretched
taut. It had a like a bubble or even rolls, two or three rolls to it
on the touch screen.
...
We were rejecting at a time anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of the touch
screens that came in.
Rather ties this in with the Florida congressional race of Christine Jennings who "lost" because 18000 of the votes in Sarasota County for Congress were lost. This was a problem known ahead of time:
But there may have been a special problem in Florida in 2006. ES&S had
sent Florida election officials a memo that summer warning of a
software glitch that could cause misvoting-and saying the company
would fix the problem. Surprisingly, neither ES&S nor the state did
anything to resolve the problem before the November election.
Dan Rather goes on to report an entirely different story that explains the "hanging chads" in Palm Beach County, this time courtesy of the Sequoia company. In 1999 Sequoia changed paper suppliers and eliminated quality control on the punch card ballots it created. He interviewed workers who said:
What changed in 1999? The paper changed. They decided that they wanted
to go with a certain brand. And I think that everybody's opinion was
this 2000 election was going to be our demise. Because of the poor
quality of what we put out the door.
...
Workers say they were
told to stop testing paper samples. Traditional quality control
standards were relaxed. There were a lot of things that we were told
to let go. And there was card bins I wouldn't sign off. I refused to
sign ‘em. They'd sit there overnight and they would say, " you gonna
sign ‘em?" and I'd say " no." come in the following morning and all the
bins had been signed off and moved to the front. Which means they're
being made into ballots. Right. Which means someone else signed ‘em off
and said let ‘em go.
The ballots created had numerous problems with chads not being punched cleanly. Apparently these ballots were especially earmarked for Palm Beach County:
Let me get this straight. You said,
' You are asking me to turn out a product that doesn't mean our usual
specifications. To be sent specifically to Palm Beach, Florida- Rightand
I'm not doing that unless someone above me signs off. That's
right. So you go to miss quality control and she won't sign off on it.
Nope. She won't ok it. So the plant manager came out and signed the OK
card for us to run ‘em at those specs because that's something that
you're not used to doing. Had this happened to you before? No was
there any other area - did somebody say " Well these ballots are going
to Louisiana Or Texas Or Arizona?" Never according to these workers,
the combination of bad paper and incorrect ballot specifications for
Palm Beach was a recipe for Election Day trouble: a high percentage of
chads that might be misaligned, wouldn't punch correctly.
This is just a small sample of what is reported by Dan Rather. This story needs to be widely reported and get a Congressional investigation.
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