Diebold voting systems skewed?
No way to double-check, as there's no paper trail.
From a comment on BlogForAmerica.com (let me know if there’s a more primary source) comes an analysis of the California gubernatorial election, breaking down total number of votes vs. votes in counties where Diebold equipment was used. The figures look like this (note that not all candidates were counted):
Candidate
Cast in Diebold counties
State total
% of the total votes cast.
All
1,403,375
7,842,630
17.89%
Schwarzenegger
581,145
3,552,787
16.36%
Bustamante
447,008
2,379,740
18.78%
McClintock
186,923
979,234
19.08%
Camejo
39,199
207,270
18.9%
Huffington
7,498
42,131
17.79%
Ueberoth
3365
21378
15.74%
Flynt
2384
15010
15.88%
Coleman
1869
12443
15.02%
Simon
1351
7648
17.66%
Palmieri
2542
3717
68.3%
Louie
598
3198
18.7%
Kunzman
1957
2133
91.75%
Roscoe
325
1941
16.7%
Sprague
1026
1576
65.10%
Macaluso
592
1504
39.36%
Price
477
1011
47.18%
Quinn
220
433
50.8%
Martorana
165
420
39.28%
Gosse
60
419
14.3%
Now, the Diebold equipment is new, and there are bound to be a few glitches in a new product, especially when it’s being used for a purpose it wasn’t designed for - an election featuring 130-odd candidates when you expect at most 10. So that’s why you have logs and a paper trail, so you can work out what went wrong. Right?
Incidentally, if there are faults in the Diebold system that can result in pathologically wrong results for small candidates, for edge cases, what’s to say that there aren’t also wrong results for some parts of the electorate of major candidates?