kucinich.house.gov

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Washington, Nov 20 -

Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (D-OH), Co-Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, unveiled a new section to his website today to highlight the problems with the current electronic voting machines and a software provider, Diebold.

While Congress has passed legislation to ensure electronic voting can be conducted safely, implementation of the legislation has been slow. As a result, numerous problems have been found with the primary software provider, Diebold’s, product. According to an independent study conducted by Johns Hopkins University the most serious of numerous flaws in Diebold’s software permit a person to vote multiple times, view ballots already cast on a machine, modify party affiliation on ballots, cause votes to be miscounted, create, delete and modify votes on voting machine, and tamper with audit logs and election results.

Worse yet, it appears that Diebold has been aware of many of the flaws yet is unwilling or unable to fix the problems. That is why today, Kucinich has unveiled a new section of his website to expose internal Diebold documents that show that it knew of flawed programs and made insecure changes to programs. Diebold has manipulated copyright law to intimidate universities and Internet service providers in order to remove these incriminating memos.

“The potential voting problems, if we continue to use these untested software programs and voting machines, will make the disaster of Florida in 2000 look mild,” stated Kucinich. “Private voting machines, free from oversight or transparency, only serve the private interest. I am proud to join today with over 50 colleges in this act of exposing Diebold. It is only through transparency and public awareness that we can reverse this dangerous trend of insecure voting.”