Edwards Fires at Diebold

Senator Edwards takes fires the latest shot at Diebold:

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards is calling on President Bush to return more than $100,000 donated to his campaign by a major manufacturer of voting machines, saying the relationship could damage confidence in elections.
Edwards, a senator from North Carolina, criticized the contributions by Walden O’Dell, head of Diebold Election Systems in a speech prepared for delivery Saturday to Florida Democrats at their annual meeting in Lake Buena Vista.
And he took a swipe at the touch screen voting machines made by Diebold, which some computer experts have questioned as lacking adequate security. Diebold officials have defended the security of their voting machines.

This Diebold situation is a potential political issue. Enough nerdy computer people have expressed security concerns to raise questions. But for it to really catch fire in the mainstream media someone’s got to present an easily-understandable case showing (1) a motive, and (2) a bad act.

“We now have touch screen voting machines that some people think are just as bad as a butterfly ballot,” Edwards said, referring to the confusing ballots that became notorious in the botched Florida election in 2000.
“What makes this worse is that one of George W. Bush’s fund-raising Pioneers said he wanted to help Ohio ‘deliver’ its electoral votes to George Bush,” Edwards said.
Edwards said that “people who make voting machines need to be real careful when they talk about delivering elections.”

Okay, thanks to O’Dell’s pro-Bush comments, the motive (conflict of interest) part of the case is already out there. But for this issue to resonate enough to generate pressure against Diebold, someone’s got to lay out the case against the machines–in terms average people can grasp. Edwards (or someone) must bring home the problem with the machines. Until that happens, this issue won’t garner much attention–except on the Internet.