Now would be an excellent time to express your support
for Bruce Funk with a letter or email, to demonstrate to
county officials that he has the support of the nation.
Bruce C. Funk - Clerk/Auditor
Fax: (435) 381-5183
95 East Main
Castle Dale, Emery County
Utah 84513
funk@co.emery.ut.us
Emery County Clerk Bruce Funk has been running elections for 23 years.
He was quite content with his optical scan system. The state of Utah thought
otherwise: On Dec. 27, Funk took delivery on 40 Diebold TSx touch-screen
machines, part of a statewide directive.
"I had concerns about Diebold," says Funk, "but I thought, 'If the
state is going
to mandate it, then I guess they'll assume responsibility if anything
goes wrong.'"
what election system will count the votes.
"YOU'RE GOING TO HATE MY GUTS ON ELECTION DAY"
Funk's concerns escalated when he heard a particularly unusual statement
by Diebold sales rep Dana LaTour.
"Some of you are going to hate my guts on Election Day," she said to the
assembly of elections officials. Later, another Diebold representative named
Drew was asked what LaTour meant when she said "Some of you are going
to hate my guts..."
"We're going to have problems on Election Day, and we're just going to have to
work through them," he said.
FAILURES RIGHT OUT OF THE GATE
Shortly after Funk received his "brand new" TSx machines, Diebold helped him
do acceptance testing. Two of the 40 machines promptly failed the
test. Diebold
arranged to take them away.
The remaining machines showed several defects -- crooked paper feeds that jam,
memory card bay doors that wouldn't close, parts getting stuck,
coming loose, falling off.
TAKING A CLOSER LOOK
Funk thought it might be a good idea to take a closer inventory.
He booted each machine up to check the battery. Some of the machines were
marked with little yellow dots, and he got to wondering about that,
too. He studied
the screen messages, and noticed something very odd.
Most machines had about 25 MB of memory available, but some had only 7 MB of
free memory left. One had only 4 MB of available memory. For perspective, the
backup election file generated by the Diebold TSx is about 7.9 MB.
Now why would
brand new voting machines have used-up memory?
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