Remember the Pinto or Why Isn't the Performance of Our Voting Machines as Important as

[kster]

the Performance of Our Blenders

by andi novick

http://www.opednews.com

When it was discovered that the Pinto had a serious design flaw, seriousness enough to cause death by immolation, apparently Ford permitted those defective cars to stay on the road. Future cars could be redesigned, but as to the existing cars, well the money just didn't justify it. Ford had calculated that the cost to redesign and repair existing cars was greater than the cost of paying off possible lawsuits for resulting deaths and accordingly decided not to recall the cars. Another way of looking at the decision exposed by the infamous Ford Pinto Memo that revealed Ford's logic might be described as gross disregard for human lives in favor of profits.

Applying that same value-based logic to the threatened democracy of the United States, a committee of the HAVA-created Election Assistance Commission (EAC) has determined that although touch screen voting machines (DREs) "are vulnerable to errors and fraud and cannot be made secure"1 (translate: will continue to put candidates into office in disregard of the votes of the American citizens) Americans will nonetheless be required to continue voting on them!

The committee, the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC), is an advisory group to the EAC. The EAC was created by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in order to give the White House centralized control over the counting of the people's election.2 The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a respected government research center, is a technical advisor to the TGDC.

The NIST report confirmed what many voting activists, silenced by a self-imposed corporate media black, have been saying for years: "the DRE provides no independent capability to detect whether fraud has not caused errors in the records. In principle, a single clever, dishonest programmer in a voting machine company could rig an entire statewide election" and the NIST research staff "do not know how to write testable requirements to satisfy that the software in a DRE is correct. 3 And yet the TGDC committee resolved only that the "next generation" of voting machines would be better.4



http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_andi_nov_061207_remember_the_pinto_o.htm