Diebold to Market Paper-Trail E-Voting System

Found on PC World on Friday, 28 January 2005
Browse Politics

Diebold Election Systems, a target of many electronic-voting critics during the 2004 U.S. election, announced Thursday it has completed the design for a printer that would give its e-voting machines a paper trail.

Diebold's printer, submitted for federal government approval several weeks ago, would create a so-called voter-verified paper trail, a function that many critics have demanded of e-voting machine manufacturers.

Voter-verified paper trails would virtually eliminate machine error in which votes aren't counted, says Will Doherty, executive director of the Verified Voting Foundation. In the November 2004 election, one county in North Carolina lost more than 4500 votes when a misunderstanding occurred over the capacity of the e-voting machines used there.

After Diebold repeatedly said that it was oh so hard and impossible to print out a little piece of paper, now it's all easy and simple? Now, after the elections? You just have to remember the words from the CEO Walden O'Dell, when he said was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year". That should make people at least wonder a little.