January 31, 2005

Diebold Engineers Finally Open Voting Machine, Find Printer

Contributing Editor Bob Pyke passed this on:

Diebold Election Systems said last week that it has finally completed the design for a printer that would give its much criticized e-voting machines a paper trail. Why it took them so long to do this is beyond me, especially since the machines already had printers in them. "[Diebold's] machines already have printers," Georgia poll worker Jed Rothwell wrote in an e-mail published last year by PBS columnist Robert Cringely. "They produce a paper receipt at the end of the day showing the vote tallies. The printers are the kind used in cash registers, and they have large rolls of paper that would easily last through the 12 hours the polls remain open. It takes people about a minute to cast a ballot, so one machine would need to print at most 720 receipts per day. The printer and paper are located on the right side of the machine, under a locked metal cover. It would be a simple matter to fabricate a new metal equipment cover with an outlet above the printer, that would print a receipt for the voter."

Thanks Bob.

Posted by Buzz Webster at January 31, 2005 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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