Full Transparency

So Diebold gets blasted on the front page of the Metro section of the Columbus Dispatch on Wednesday. Maybe the legendary blind men feeling up an elephant at the Big D’s editorial board are close to grasping the obvious: private, partisan, nontransparent e-voting machines with proprietary software are unreliable and undermine democracy.

The Diebold machines in Cuyahoga County, according to the recent Election Science Institute (ESI) study fail to perform in any acceptable way. ESI found that nearly 10% of Cuyahoga County’s voters’ ballots during the May 2 primary were “destroyed, blank, illegible, missing, taped together or otherwise compromised,” according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s coverage. 

Let’s see. Ten percent in Cleveland, the state’s key Democratic stronghold, another ten percent here, ten percent there. Pretty soon Blackwell’s 27% support among voters becomes a majority after he and his buddies at Diebold systematically disenfranchise urban voters. 

Of the course the idea for these machines not only came from Blackwell, but the epically corrupt Congressman Bob Ney, who brought us the HAVA bill and the rigged e-voting machines after the Bush boys stole Florida with punch cards in the 2000 election. 

My demand as a gubernatorial candidate is to hold the November vote on the only technology that is transparent: pencil and paper. Let us raise the demand and the slogan: No Voting Machines in November! Hand Counted Paper Ballots Only.