Ok..think of ALL the articles googled and found by DUers SINCE 11/2..articles and stats from ***BEFORE*** Black Tuesday..example of one below. HOW the HELL can anyone be allowed to get away with saying NOW they never thought about the machines/software fucking up the election? Where were the hearings and protests and gripes before 11/2??? It's not like the companies and thugs involved had a stellar rep before they stole the election this time around.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/978/In the Alabama 2002 general election, machines made by Election Systems and Software (ES&S) flipped the governor’s race. Six thousand three hundred Baldwin County electronic votes mysteriously disappeared after the polls had closed and everyone had gone home. Democrat Don Siegelman’s victory was handed to Republican Bob Riley, and the recount Siegelman requested was denied. Three months after the election, the vendor shrugged. “Something happened. I don’t have enough intelligence to say exactly what,” said Mark Kelley of ES&S
<snip>
The excuses given for these miscounts are just as flawed as the election results themselves. Vendors have learned that reporters and election workers will believe pretty much anything, as long as it sounds high-tech. They blame incorrect vote counts on “a bad chip” or “a faulty memory card,” but defective chips and bad memory cards have very different symptoms. They don’t function at all, or they spit out nonsensical data.
<snip>
Voting machine vendors claim these things are amazingly accurate. Bob Urosevich, who has headed three voting machine companies under five corporate names, said in 1990 that his company’s optical-scan machines had an error rate of only “one-thousandth of 1 percent.” At that time Urosevich was with ES&S (then called American Information Systems). Recently, the same Urosevich (now president of Diebold Election Systems) gave an even more glowing endorsement of his company’s touch-screen accuracy.
<snip>
Tom Eschberger became a vice president of ES&S not long after he accepted an immunity deal for cooperating with prosecutors in a case against Arkansas Secretary of State Bill McCuen, who pleaded guilty to taking kickbacks and bribes in a scheme related to computerized voting systems. Eschberger reported that a test conducted on a malfunctioning machine and its software in the 1998 general election in Honolulu, Hawaii, showed the machine worked normally. He said the company did not know that the machine wasn’t functioning properly until the Supreme Court ordered a recount, when a second test on the same machine detected that it wasn’t counting properly.