Iowa Diebolds Not Sequestered
Iowa has not ordered the sequestering of its new Diebold touchscreen election equipment, according to John Hedgecoth, Deputy Secretary of State for Operations. So InsideBayArea.com was in error when it made that claim last week:
Pennsylvania, California and Iowa are issuing emergency notices to local elections officials, generally telling them to “sequester” their Diebold touch screens and reprogram them with “trusted” software issued by the state capital.
But the part about trusted software (it always comes back to “trust” for some people) does apply to Iowa. Hedgecoth told an independent online newspaper called The New Standard that
his office instructed elections officials in the state’s 99 counties to upload a final version of the software into their machines just before Election Day and then seal the machine with the memory card in it. “So we are controlling both the software in the field with a final version that is decided upon by our elections division, and then we’re securing the memory card against tampering on Election Day,” he said.
Not only is the sequestering report wrong about Iowa, these two reports (Rubin and Klein) must also be wrong about how difficult it is to know just whose software will actually control the action on election day. I don’t know the track record of Klein, but Avi Rubin’s track record is good. If he is wrong. even I will need someone new to trust.