Dear Friends of Open Voting:

On Halloween eve, we struck back against one of the scariest voting machines
ever produced. The Diebold TS voting machine obtained on eBay by Open Voting
Foundation met justice.

My first reaction when I found out the machine was available on eBay June 15 of last year was "take a sledgehammer" to it! [1] It turns out we did get the
machine, but several friends talked me out of smashing it -- for the time being.
This was a good thing because it helped us make some other points.

We examined the machine in some detail and reported on various faults we found. In March of this year, the Associated Press cited Open Voting Foundation in an article explaining why Diebold might want to exit the voting system business [2].

Diebold decided to take their name off the voting machines, and we helped them a bit with that.

Another idea was to turn the machine into a trustworthy voting machine by adding a printer and replacing the proprietary secret software with public software. We concluded that the machine was just too badly designed for this
to be economical.

So, back to my original idea.

The event was very well documented. Several TV and radio stations covered it.

There is a video report on YouTube by Sebastian Kunz of 960 The Quake.
http://sfnewsfeed.us/stories/diebold_smashing_video.html

There were many still pictures taken as well. Here are a few courtesy of Alec
Bash:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=19091&l=00942&id=645481201
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alecbash/

Thank you and best wishes.

Alan Dechert
http://openvoting.org

[1] http://gnosis.python-hosting.com/voting-project/June.2006/0042.html
(the machine was one of several hundred sent back to Diebold by
Maryland after the 2004 election, but somehow got stuck in shipping.
After 1.5 years, the shipper put it on eBay along with other unclaimed
freight)
[2] http://gnosis.python-hosting.com/voting-project/March.2007/0022.html