State Claims Diebold Data
is Proprietary
January 24, 2006
Tuesday AM
The Alaska State Division of Elections has denied access to public
records that are needed to verify the accuracy of the 2004 General
Election vote results, the Alaska Democratic Party (ADP) said
Monday.
The Division of Elections claims that its electronic computer
file that contains all the final vote tallies for the 2004 General
Election is proprietary information belonging to its contractor,
Diebold Election Systems.
"It is wrong that the State of Alaska is letting Diebold
take possession of our votes and our public data by claiming
that these are their proprietary information. This is not acceptable
or legally supportable," said state Democratic Party chair
Jake Metcalfe.
Although Diebold claims that their data structure is proprietary,
it is publicly available on the Internet today and has been for
several years according to Alaska Democrats.
The Alaska Democratic Party asserts numerous discrepancies are
apparent in the 2004 General Election votes tallied by the state's
Diebold computer system and posted on the Division of Election's
web site, the Alaska Democratic Party said Monday. According
to the posted "Statement of Votes Cast" by district
and precinct, a far larger number of votes were cast than the
official totals reported in the statewide summary. In many of
the House Districts, more votes are shown in the totals than
there are voters in the district. In the case of President George
Bush's votes, the district-by-district totals add up to 292,267,
but his official total was only 190,889, a difference of 101,378
votes. In the U.S. Senate race, Lisa Murkowski received 226,992
votes in the district-by-district totals, but her official total
was only 149,446, a difference of 77,546 votes.
The Division of Election's web site says "the STATEMENT
OF VOTES CAST provides results for all candidates by district
and precinct." However the Alaska Democratic Party points
out the district-by-district posted results do not show how many
votes were cast for each candidate in the 40 House districts,
and those results do not match the Official Results Statewide
Summary showing who won the elections.
The Alaska Democratic Party filed a public records request Dec.
19, 2005 seeking a copy of the "central tabulator data file"
used to run the "GEMS" (Global Election Management
Software) application, as well as other public records, related
to the 2004 election results. None of the records requested would
reveal how any individual voted.
The Alaska Division of Elections
responded in a Jan.19th letter to the Alaska Democratic Party
that it would not provide the central tabulator data file because
"the structure of the database file from GEMS is proprietary
information" belonging to Diebold.
On the Web:
In the News Diebold
Source:
Alaska Democratic Party
E-mail your news &
photos to editor@sitnews.us
Publish A Letter on SitNews Read Letters/Opinions
Submit
A Letter to the Editor
SitNews
Stories In The News
Ketchikan, Alaska
|