Boston Globe: Voting device pact at issue. The municipal election in Arlington today raised this article to my attention. Voting machines by AutoMARK, which use a touchscreen to produce a paper ballot as part of a disabled voter assistance measure, were in use in some precincts in Arlington today. And Diebold would have liked to stop them: they’ve filed suit against the state for choosing the wrong product.
Yes, seriously.
I hope that AutoMARK’s machines passed some of the tests that Diebold’s have failed, such as not being able to be opened using an ordinary file cabinet key and not being able to be arbitrarily manipulated to rig an election. But even if that level of testing hasn’t been conducted, the premise of the suit is pretty hysterical. After all, why wouldn’t one want to purchase insecure, hackable voting machines that don’t leave a paper trail?