Black Box Comes to California
A few days ago, the Secretary of State of California, Bruce McPherson, certified those Diebold Election Systems electronic voting systems to be used in California for upcoming elections. Up to twenty-one counties in California are said to be interested in buying them, including Alameda, Marin, and Humboldt. The move is a bit of a reversal in that McPherson, a Republican (this will become important in a bit, so hold on), said that he'd wait for test results from the Independent Testing Authority (ITA) before approving, but just went ahead and announced the move anyways before hearing from them.
You might remember the Diebold Voting Systems black boxes from such films as "Ohio: How to Steal an Election" or "Georgia: How to Steal an Election, the Phantom Menace." Not to mention such side splitting comedies as "Hacked!" "Being Indicted" and our favorite, "Paper? We Don't Need No Stinking Paper!" The boxes, which a Diebold insider told an interviewer were made to be "purposely complex and poorly designed" have been doing so well, in fact, the Governor of Maryland rescinded a deal with Diebold after all sorts of bugs kept on appearing. And in the past couple of years, there was a re-vote in a county in Ohio after an election was held and more votes were counted than people in the county (hmmmm). McPherson acknowledged that the current Diebold machines had bugs in them, but said that Diebold promised with cherries on top that they'd fix it in time for the election. Diebold machines were actually used in previous California elections but were taken out after all sorts of bugs appeared.
Recently, Schwarzenegger added a mini-Rove, Steve Schmidt, to his campaign staff. And so, a few days after Schmidt's appearance, McPherson makes his switcheroo. Now this is where the tin foil hats come out because the thinking is that like something out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a Diebold machine gets carefully placed in the biggest blue state of them all and within an election or two, we're suddenly red. We'd normally scoff at something like this, but after doing some research on this, we're starting to feel more Mulder than Scully about this. Things like this story is kind of scary.