SLO Voting

Last month, I wrote a brief post about voting machines, acknowledging that I understand very little about the controversy, except that even I understand that it isn't a good idea to have people vote using computers with no paper trail. I wasn't concerned about our local system, though, because we use optical scan machines. The machines are made by Diebold, which looks about as fair and balanced as Fox News, but there's a paper trail -- boxes of scantron cards that anybody could look at if there were any suspicions of fraud, or even honest error. What could go wrong?

Plenty. In the March 2002 primary election, the vote counts from our absentee and mail-in ballots showed up on Diebold's Web site in the middle of the afternoon -- four and a half hours before the polls closed.

What the hell was Diebold doing looking at our vote counts in the middle of election day? And how did they get those votes?
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