Watch out South Carolina - ES&S voting systems ALERT

For those of you who are concerned about the Diebold election systems in New Hampshire and wish to be aware of potential problems with the electronic voting machines, remember that in South Carolina, they use ES&S voting machines.

ES&S systems actually have similar problems to the Diebold systems. South Carolina will be using the ES&S systems and they have been banned from use in Ohio and Colorado. The ban was prompted by a study done for the state of Ohio in which researchers found electronic voting systems could be corrupted with magnets or handheld electronic devices such as Palm Treos.

"Last month, top election officials in Ohio and Colorado declared that Election Systems and Software's iVotronic is unfit for elections."

http://www.charleston.net/news/2008/jan/07/s_c_use_voting_machines_banned_other_sta26854


The issue is not the company that produced the e-voting system. The questions that must be asked are more along the lines of who maintains these systems? How do recounts happen? How may a voter verify his/her ballot? How are the votes counted?

The technologies of ES&S, Diebold and Sequoia systems have all been criticized by several computer science professors across the United States. If you want to go in to technical detail, there are many concerns, but suffice it to say that if you think that just clicking on a touch screen and hoping your vote will be recorded in a machine or even writing a ballot and not knowing how that ballot will be counted electronically, your votes can now be rigged.

To stay up to date on how to verify your vote check out:

http://www.verifiedvoting.org/