Saw this essay posted on slashdot this afternoon. He conducted an independent recount of votes in Humbolt County, CA and discovered a software bug in Diebold’s GEMS (which counts scanned paper ballots generated by touch screen voting) that will delete the first set of scanned ballots if you delete any other set of scans(!)
It’s a good example of how horribly flawed the closed source software development model is when applied to the public sector. Diebold bought a piece of crap that someone else wrote and now they’re trying to recoup their investment. They have no incentive to actually fix the software - that would cost money and it’s far more profitable to downplay the issue and keep pushing the product. Meanwhile, the people who have an interest in fixing the software can’t because they don’t actually own it. Imagine your car having an annoying oil leak and you have to wait for GM to get around to fixing it. GM doesn’t really care if your car is burning oil. They’re not the ones buying a quart of oil every week to top it off. Can you imagine the City Fire Department not being able to get their trucks fixed because they only lease them? That’s exactly the problem with Closed source software. You don’t own the software and the person most affected by the problem is powerless to remedy it.
It’s not so much that there’s a vast conspiracy to control American elections as there is a misapplication of a bad business model to a sector where it should never have been applied in the first place.