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Talk Nation Radio for November 28, 2007

Diebold Memory Cards found with Junk Data in CT

Alex Shvartsman of the University of Connecticut’s Voting Research Team joins us to discuss his findings of “junk data” on memory cards delivered to the polls for the November 6, 2007 State and Municipal Election. The team will release their report on the memory card failures shortly.

Listen to this week’s show here

TRT: 29:41
Produced by Dori Smith at WHUS at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, CT
Download at Pacifica’s Audioport Or Archive.org

We look at the team’s finding and compare their results with what is known about other Diebold AccuVote OS machine memory card failures in Florida. Journalist M.C. Moewe of the Daytona Beach News-Journal Online was able to review records created at the polls to detect a high failure rate for Diebold’s optical scanner memory cards, so we set out to try to learn if there were high rates of card failures going undetected in Connecticut’s machines. Our interviews with nine state registrars and other town workers reveals that of nine towns four had memory card problems. In three instances officials explained how LHS removed failing cards during set up and replaced them with newly programmed cards.

The timing of the replacement process by LHS would indicate that they were collecting failing cards from polls even as the state was in the process of obtaining their sample of cards in order to test for failures and problems with the coding. The cards were failing during a time not as well covered by the state’s security protocols and no one would have known about these replacements had it not been for our interviews.

LHS President John Silvestro has refused to provide information on the number of memory cards his company replaced to CT polls just prior to the election. Instead he referred us to the Secretary of the State’s office for information but thus far we have not been able to obtain those records from them either. In fact, we were told that the law doesn’t cover that request and so we are looking into other ways to find out how many cards failed but were not included in UConn’s sample.

We were also finally able to get through to Diebold’s Premier Election Solutions where Juan Serratti in the technical division said the optical scan machines manufactured by the company are all the same in terms of the hardware systems. He said the J40 connector systems in question in Florida’s machine would be the same for all optical scanners in use nationwide and that the differences are in the light optics in the reader, the software, and the modems. Alex Shvartsman explains that he disagrees with the company on statements to M.C. Moewe indicating that other states were not having problems.

Contact Dori Smith at talknationradio (@) gmail.com for further information

Contact the University of Connecticut’s Voting Research Team Here

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