KMUD news director Estelle Fennell interviewed Jim Marsh (or Marshall?) of Black Box Voting on 11/30/05. He said Secretary of State Bruce McPherson was talking about testing other vendors as well as Diebold, and they're getting lots of conflicting info from SoS staffers and Diebold. Though they have agreed a machine will be randomly selected from operational machines, when/how tests will be performed is still up in the air. BBV is also concerned that media will be excluded from the tests. They want to test both touch-screen and optical scan, this month.

Marsh said the biggest concern was insider tampering and manipulation and called Diebold machines "tamper friendly" especially because they have no audit trail -- who did what to which machine, when. He said no bank or corporate financial institution would have accounting controls this sloppy inside. It would be very difficult to block an insider from tampering with data, he said. It's not that hard to provide an audit trial to track this, he said, and the Diebold line "fails top to bottom" on providing an audit log.

Estelle said, so even if you can do these tests, your argument is the system is already flawed. He said, pretty much so. Others looked at Global Election SystemÕs equipment before Diebold bought the company and decided it was more of a demonstration model, not for "mission critical applications such as voting." "It's a toy," he said.

Diebold bought GES without changing anything substantially, certainly without revamping computer framework underneath it despite computer scientists telling them they must. Like "any other serious reviewer that has looked at a Diebold product," a state of MD-commissioned report called it, generally, not ready for prime time. "This thing needs a total code rewrite, from top to bottom with more secure architecture. It's a disaster," he said.

Estelle asked him, what would be secure? He replied, for example, heavy-duty professional grade financial software would be much more robust. BBV would like to see basic research and development into that and also into improving hand counting, comparing the two in the long run. She asked, what about the argument that there is a paper trail? He said, "If it's read, that's the key. . . . If the paper is not read, that's a problem." He said BBV knows of at least two ways counties have subverted the 1% mandatory spot check. One common way is by not assigning absentee votes to their precincts, then "you can simply tamper with the absentee ballot data and you can steal an election."

Estelle said she would air more of Marsh's interview and talk to county officials in future broadcasts. She said the county has allowed people to watch the 1% recount.