More Diebold Scandal

How Dare You Actually Want Secure And Valid Elections?!?
from the take-that,-whistle-blower dept of Techdirt:

Back in December, a Florida county ran some hacking tests on Diebold's ballot counting machine and found them to have serious security issues, which made the county elections supervisor, Ion Sancho, ban the questionable machines. Diebold responded not by showing that their machines were secure, but by cracking jokes about the whole thing. Why were they so amused by the whole situation? Perhaps because they're the ones in the power position. They were able to get around a similar ban in California and now none of the approved voting machine vendors will even sell approved e-voting machines to Sancho, effectively punishing him for daring to make sure the machines were accurate and secure. This is a bit strange, as you'd expect the other two approved firms, Sequoia Voting Systems and Election Systems & Software, would jump at the chance to both replace Diebold and prove their machines accurate and secure. Instead, it sounds like the only firm that is even willing to negotiate with him... is Diebold. But, they want to put in a clause in the contract that would ban him from conducting any such tests again. Instead, he'd only be allowed to perform "authorized" tests -- because we all know that anyone involved in election fraud follows the "authorized" rules for hacking these machines. Diebold also spins things around by complaining that Sancho is responsible for undermining "the public's confidence in the security and accuracy" of Diebold machines. That's funny, we thought Diebold was doing a damn fine job of that entirely on its own.