Diebold saves money by hiring/training day before election.

[psi29a]

Throughout the early part of the day, there was a Diebold representative at our precinct. When I was setting up the poll books, he came over to "help", and I ended up explaining to him why I had to hook the ethernet cables into a hub instead of directly into all the machines (not to mention the fact that there were not enough ports on the machines to do it that way). The next few times we had problems, the judges would call him over, and then he called me over to help. After a while, I asked him how long he had been working for Diebold because he didn't seem to know anything about the equipment, and he said, "one day." I said, "You mean they hired you yesterday?" And he replied, "yes, I had 6 hours of training yesterday. It was 80 people and 2 instructors, and none of us really knew what was going on." I asked him how this was possible, and he replied, "I shouldn't be telling you this, but it's all money. They are too cheap to do this right. They should have a real tech person in each precinct, but that costs too much, so they go out and hire a bunch of contractors the day before the election, and they think that they can train us, but it's too compressed." Around 4 pm, he came and told me that he wasn't doing any good there, and that he was too frustrated, and that he was going home. We didn't see him again.

I have no source for this as I recieved it over IM from a friend of mine. May or may not be factual...

Edit: found the source

[Bengal]

Dear lord, that's absurd.

This is NOT rocket motherfucking science. There is NO GOOD REASON for these machines to be crafted so shittily, apart from the government going for the lowest bidder, and the lowest bidder cutting every corner possible in order to make more money.

We need to take the "lowest Bidder" system out of use and stop paying absurd amounts of money for the lowest quality work we can find.

[Killfile]

It's not lowest bidder -- open source is free.

[Bengal]

open source is free, yes, but the implementation within the government requires contracting out work, because there's not a government position for that, and there won't be anytime soon.

[psi29a]

Thats interesting considering that the DoJ Senior Information Architect created the white papers necessary ( 3 years ago ) that makes it ok to use open source (GPL) in government projects, at least in the DoJ. Their implimentation is in house, not contracted.

That is us talking about the government, which has very little to do with the topic of Diebold which is a privetly held company who's ties to government is that their machines count the votes that puts people in office

So I fail to see how your comment has any impact on a privetly held (read non government) company.

I agree that Diebold hasn't been exactly honest with the public, a technical review of their hardware (on another site, I don't have the link handy) shows how if you are able to open the box, that you can toggle a dip-switch and it reboots to a totally different set of settings that tended toward the republican party when 'irregularities' where found.

[Bengal]

Call it paranoia, I suppose.

All of my past dealings with shoddy workmanship in this sort of thing have been the direct result of contractors cutting corners, so I jumped to the wrong conclusion. Then again, the part of the government I dealt with was definitely NOT able to use open source utilities, so while I'm highly opinionated on the subject (and I'll defend my opinions as best I can), I'm not the best informed on the subject of electronic voting.

[psi29a]

I think the point was that this is a private company (contractor if you will) that is cutting corners.

Even then, MySQL (for example) got the Government thumbs up too.

source

With the GSA contract, GS-35F-0131R Schedule 70, government customers will be able to purchase and deploy MySQL through Carahsoft Technology Corp. The GSA schedule is effective Dec. 20, 2005 through Nov. 19, 2009.

The win comes at a time when governments are increasingly turning to open source, much to the chagrin of Microsoft Corp. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, for one, has set a deadline of Aug. 31 for storing all executive branch documents in OpenDocument Format.

The U.S. federal government also met in November to flesh out a process of building an open-source software stack that will be used across agencies to develop, deploy and maintain applications across their life cycle. That stack will include such open-source components as the JBoss application server and the Eclipse application development environment.

I have worked in the IT industry and have had the pleasure of dealing with EDS and other DoD contractors, cutting corners is the least of the problems involving pentagon, congress, and the contractors.

Local governments and states have a choice as to how they want to handle voting, Diebold is actively lobbying for their product to be one used. I find it shameful that such a company would do this especially with our elections at stake. I wish more of this would make it to the press.

[Bengal]

Shameful it may be, but it's certainly not an unexpected move. Particularly with their heavy right wingnut ties.