Press release from Rep. Cynthia McKinney's Diebold press conference

July 17, 2005

Congresswoman McKinney Reveals Shocking Data on Diebold and Elections in Georgia

“I have been investigating Diebold and electronic voting as a citizen, a candidate, and a Congresswoman. We reveal the first results of our investigation today.” Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney

(Decatur, GA) .. www.house.gov/mckinney …Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney held a press conference on Diebold and electronic voting in her District office today. With her at the event was Mr. Sam Barber, owner of American Computer Technology (ACT). Mr. Barber was a former partner with Diebold Elections Systems on the original 54 million dollar contract with the State of Georgia to provide equipment and services for Georgia elections. Mr. Barber’s company was to provide assembly and testing services for the Diebold DRE machines. Together, McKinney and Barber painted a very different picture of the problems with testing, certification, and the machines themselves than the picture of an almost flawless election that has been painted by the State of Georgia.

With internal memos between Diebold and the State of Georgia, which were acquired through open records, and Mr. Barbers testimony, it was revealed that the voting machines used in the 2002 election were not adequately tested, the training provided by Diebold for Georgia election officials was seriously flawed, and in some cases nonexistent. It appears that the election was almost completely turned over to Diebold by the State of Georgia. “We continue to focus on the symptoms of the problem, instead of focusing on the source of the problems”, stated Barber. One of the documents shown to the audience and given to the press was a draft of the Georgia “Punch List”, dated December 3, 2002, which was after the general election had already been held. The List contained numerous bugs and errors that were encountered during the election, but kept from the public.

Although the State of Georgia declared that the election went smoothly and encountered few problems, the Punch List revealed problems with the memory cards running low or out of memory, defective voting units, defective encoder performance, and deficient training on safeguards to detect tampering or theft. The list states, “Diebold staff providing training to counties, in many cases, were not adequately trained themselves and at times provided inaccurate information.” The list indicated that during the election, at least 5 county servers failed, and that there was evidence of failure with additional servers. Some CDs received from the counties that were supposed to contain election results were blank. There were also problems with a patch that was installed, and problems with “jumping” selections of candidates. Overall, the election was fraught with very serious problems, many of which had the potential to alter the results of the election.

This was the first in a series of press conferences that McKinney has planned to inform the public of the danger of electronic voting without a verifiable paper trail.