Diebold apologizes for device flaws
Tri-Valley Herald Online - Diebold apologizes for device flaws
By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER
It is an uncommon day when the nation’s second-largest provider of voting systems concedes that its flagship products in California have significant security flaws and that it supplied hundreds of poorly designed electronic-voting devices that disenfranchised voters in the March presidential primary.
Diebold Election Services Inc. president Bob Urosevich admitted this and more, and apologized “for any embarrassment.”
“We were caught. We apologize for that,” Urosevich said of the mass failures of devices needed to call up digital ballots. Poll-workers in Alameda and San Diego counties hadn’t been trained on ways around their failure, and San Diego County chose not to supply polls with backup paper ballots, crippling the largest rollout of e-voting in the nation on March 2. Unknown thousands of voters were turned away at the polls.
“We’re sorry for the inconvenience of the voters,” Urosevich said.
“Weren’t they actually disenfranchised?” asked Tony Miller, chief counsel to the state’s elections division.
After a moment, Urosevich agreed: “Yes, sir.”
So now what? Where does Diebold go from here? Fines? Or do they just market their buggy software to democracies outside the US like other US companies do with their faulty products that can’t be sold here (Nestle’s baby formula comes to mind). Sorry just doesn’t cut it IMHO.