Asymmetrical Information

Of course if you trot out the line about how if they couldn't keep a little light larceny at the Watergate building secret, then how the hell are they going to cover up an alien spaceship crashing, the conspirazoids just say, "see? That's how secret the conspiracy is!'

Jane:

I don't really have a dog in the fight, so I'm mostly being contrary (coffee-machine broken), but why would you need that many people to do it? Don't programmers put eggs in all manner of large sized software all the time without anyone else on their team knowing it?

Also, conspiracies may be hard to pull off, but they do get attempted. After all, they're just agreements between parties to get something illegal done. Not all of the parties have to know what they are working towards.

Finally, in attempt to calibrate your suspicion of conspiracies, riddle me this: do you think that what happened at Abu Gharib was the result of five of six "bad apples" or part of some wider agreement among a wider net of people about how detainees should be treated? Did you ever believe the "bad apple" theory? If you've changed your mind from the "bad apple" theory, what changed it and how long did it take? What percentage of your readers do you think still believe the "bad apple" theory? What percentage of Faux News viewers do?

I guess the point I'm making is that the "wider net" theory is clearly a conspiracy theory, but it seems to be gaining credibility. So the question is what level of evidence do you require to move from a non-conspiracy theory ("bad apples") to a conspiracy theory ("wide net").

Well, the California decertification decision found active fraud on the part of Diebold, which I believe implicates a level of misconduct above and beyond drooling incompetence (the face the Diebold CEO tried to put on the matter in the public hearings).

You also don't like to hear that the CEO of the company is "committed to helping Ohio (a key battleground state) deliver its electoral votes to the president next year" as it's up for a contract to sell the state voting machines.

Personally, I don't know whether it's possible for Diebold to deliver on its promise through its shoddy machinery, but there's always the appearance of a conflict of interest.

I have no problem at all with your disdain for conspiracy theories. Having said that, you gotta admit it's pretty dumb for the CEO of a company that sells voting machines to be a large-scale fundraiser for one candidate. The outrage may be misguided, but it's perfectly predictable and perfectly avoidable.

Avi Rubin has an informative page about e-voting, and Diebold in particular. Anyone interested (like voters) should read the paper he authored on the subject. I have 20+ years experience in software & electrical engineering, including ultra-high reliability and security systems, and trust me this guy knows what he is talking about.

(Putting on my tinfoil hat...)Despite the addage not to attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, the obverse should be considdered:
that a malevolent action could be facilitated, in part by actions that could be defended as mere incompetence. Say for example a the owner of a locksmithing company is in cahoots with a burglar, or a gang thereof. The locksmith has contracts to install locks in apartment buildings. Then he installs locks with known weaknesses to picking, or maybe even has custom tumblers or other parts made, if it is a big outfit. The locksmith then merely tells his burglar buddies, nudge,nudge, wink, wink. "I used brand X model Y locks". Nobody suspects anything: no key / wrong key, lock doesn't open, right key and it does. Stick a bobby pin all the way in and pry up, and it opens too. The grunts actually installing the locks don't notice anything, the residents don't know anything, maybe a few locksmiths wonder why he is using such crappy locks in Ritzville, although they are shiny brass and chrome, and operate smoothly. If any other locksmiths make a ruckus, the public assumes they have ulterior motives ("He's jealous because HE didn't get the Ritzville contract!" or "He's just one of those paranoids who waits up all night with an AK47 waiting for burglars!"). Then the burglars, if they are smart, don't clean out Ritzville in a night, they merely make a few, well-chosen hits to make a tidy profit. Or swing an election. (Removing tinfoil hat)

I was hesitant to make the above metaphor, because I really do not think there is a conspiracy with Diebold et al, but I wanted to rebuff those over-confident ones who think that the idea is completely impossible.

Back to the most important issue, the technical details of e-voting machines. Any system used to tally votes, should, at a bare minimum:
1) Generate a paper record of each vote
2) Be constructed of software and hardware that is open to public review. That rules out the Windows OS (which is full of numerous security holes to begin with). The only reason (an obsolete version of) Diebold's software saw the light of day was a leak.
3) Employ sophisticated encryption for all data transfers

The current generation of Diebold / other e-voting machines do none of these.

As far as the League of Women Voters endorsing paperless e-voting machines ala Diebold, they have reversed their stance. Aparently they got a lot of flak because they accepted a $1 million gift for a new training institute from Diebold, who put the testimonial on their website. Their only justification for supporting paperless e-voting was some vague mumbling about making voting accessable to the disabled.

But I maintain that the real issue is the crappy technical quality of e-voting machines; people who rant about the republicans/freemasons/martians trying to rig the elections are diluting the information space.

But isn't it always the socialist nations that report than the ruling party won with 99.85% of the vote?

Why is it with a URL like janegalt.net, that this blog attracts far more leftists and pragmatic Republicans, rather than objectivist fans of Ayn? I see why Lev Kovalensky started drinking...

SomeCallMeTim,

You don't explain how you've arrived at your belief that what the six at Abu Gharib
did wasn't their own invention. You simply imply that anyone that doesn't
believe as you do must be a fool or ignorant.

I don't find your reasoning persuasive. For a start I think you need to explain
exactly why you believe this instead of referring vaguely to others believing the same.

For my part I don't think it was a systematic conspiracy, and I'll note two points
of evidence that conflict with your belief.

(a) At least three of the six were already being courtmartialed before any publicity.
Indeed it was the fact that they were being courtmartialed that led directly
to these pictures and videos being put in the hands of the press. So if it was policy,
why in the world were these people being courtmartialed?

(b) The pictures and videos extend over some span of time, but all the really
bad events seemed to have happened on one day. That's just a suggestive observation,
but it's incongruent with any systematic policy.

Sorry Jane, but at this point I refuse to trust the Republicans on this or any topic.

Your and your loyal readers' airy dismissals of legitimate concerns about electronic voting sound very much like similar wavings away of objections to the war in Iraq.

You'll excuse me if I decide to trust my own judgment.

how on earthy do you think the CEO of Diebold is going to get a couple hundred staff members to stay mum about their secret plot to steal the election

easy, it isn't necessary for the whole company to be in on it. All you need is for 1 person to be aware of at least one flaw, and a company culture that tolerates leaving it in place.

That one person who does the actual vote total manipulation need not even be a member of the development team. He only needs access to source code, or detailed knowledge of working exploits, and a gurantee that the code will not be changed for a few days before the election.

We know for a fact that there are MANY hackable flaws in the Diebold equipment. Although since the leak of their code is not ongoing, only somone with source access can be assured that a particular flaw will still be in place on election day.

I will agree that the statements of upper management aren't particularly important. Executives probably don't have the skills to hack the vote themselves, they would need to contract that out, and only a fool would say the things in public that they have said if they really intended to hack the vote.

Even if there is a conspiracy, it hardly seems likely that the administartion would trust the Diebold people to personally hack the vote.
Far more likely Diebold's job it to provide final source code to some covert Bush operative and to gurantee that the code would not change between then and the election.

With no paper trail, you would actually have to catch the hacker AND tie him to a particular politician for there to be any downside. And even then, all you could do to rectify the situation would be re-do the voting.

Some people on this blog have ridiculed the idea that we should be skeptical of Diebold's intentions. The political orientation of the CEO is thrown out as irrelevant. If he had merely announced he was a Bush supporter and/or was going to vote for Bush in the election, that would be one thing. But he's a "Pioneer" - a bigtime fundraiser. Whether there's a conflict or not, it generates a plausible appearance of conflict, and those more skeptical of corporate good intentions than you might choose to focus on it. The companies that make voting machines, like Caesar's wife, must not only be above suspicion but also _appear_ so.

I also don't like the idea of using proprietary software - especially not proprietary software that runs on the exploit-prone Windows platform. (As a programmer, I was floored when I heard that - don't they have any embedded systems guys? You should run a voting machine on a Z80 or a 65C02, not a full-fledged PC with all its serpentine architecture.) If we're going to use electronic voting machines (probably not a bad idea in itself) the code should be written by public employees, not for-profit corporations, and open sourced well before the election so that any security flaws can be noted and fixed in advance. Why should I have to trust a black box with my vote?

And Diebold's _specific_ refusal to provide a paper audit trail is extremely suspicious. We're not talking about them saying "hey, that's a change request, it's going to cost more $$$ to change it at this late date" - that would be normal expected behavior for a for-profit corporation, and nothing out of the ordinary. We're talking about them saying absolutely not under any circumstances. Almost as if they wanted to hide something. Even though these are modified versions of their ATM platform, which most certainly DOES provide a paper trail.

Diebold also has strong links to Christian Reconstructionists - basically the Christian version of Wahabbism. I don't know about you, but I get very nervous when I see people who claim that representative government is an abomination against God get this close to our voting machinery.

Also: Mark Amerman claims that the Abu Gharib atrocities were isolated incidents with no sanction from higher-ups. I do not believe that for a second. If this is so, then why was Bush commissioning legal memos trying to justify the use of torture as a battle tactic? No, this fish rots from the head down.

Mark:

It's funny that you took offense on the grounds that you did; I tried to imply that she didn't believe it was a few individuals acting alone b/c I thought that would be offensive. Just goes to show ... well something smart and cliched that I can't think of right now.

Here are my datapoints for thinking that there is what amounts to a conspiracy to abuse prisoners outside the law:

1. The Rumsfeld torture memo;
2. The Office of Legal Counsel's torture memo;
(I note that I can't find a respected legal scholar who will defend the legal analysis in the memos - if there is one, please point him or her out).
3. The Rumsfeld admission that we have "ghost prisoners" we don't want to admit we have;
4. The recent request by (IIRC) Gen. Sanchez for a higher ranking general to question him;
5. Admission by Army dog handlers that they were instructed by military intelligence to use dogs to scare detainees;
6. Abu Gharib photos;
7. Increasing number of news reports, from reporters that have had good information more often than the WH, of abusive conduct along the lines of Abu Gharib (including detaining or terrorizing apparently innocent family members to scare Iraqis into providing information).
There are other data points, like Karpinski's claims that Sanchez knew about this stuff, but those are the main ones.

To me, it looks like the Administration attempted to use justify and then use unlawful methods of abuse to obtain information. It looks like the Abu Gharib photos are an outgrowth of those efforts. Did Rumsfeld and co. want those specific abuses to occur? I don't know, but it doesn't matter. IIRC, in conspiracy, there doesn't have to be a group agreement about the specifics of what should happened. Instead, you can chain the illegal agreements if all are part of the same enterprise. So Rumsfeld wants illegal things done to get information, and then illegal things are done to get information. It doesn't really matter if those aren't the specific illegal things he wanted done - he's still responsible for those acts in furtherance of the conspiracy. (It doesn't have to be Rumsfeld - it could be Cheney or someone else). (I would gladly accept correction and vilification from someone who practice criminal law, though the argument is not about specific criminal charges that could be brought - more of an analogy).

Could all of these events be completely unrelated. I guess. But it isn't the simplest, clearest explanation for these datapoints. I think the conspiracy I've laid out is - I'd lay odds on it, but I don't trust the Republican Congress to look very hard into this.

Go see Anne Applebaum's column in the WP if I've made a hash of this. I'm a bit tired.

You'll excuse me if I decide to trust my own judgment.

A more dangerous course of action was ne'er proposed, given what you have previously passed off on this forum as being "your judgment."

As for Jane, I'm sure she's just devastated.

I was involved in building the first generation of the Accuvotes. Those are the ones that worked perfectly in Georgia in 2002 - after 6 months of frantic debugging in the middle of production. Hardware-wise, they went to production with timing violations in the memory chip selects, and didn't discover them until we'd cranked out several hundred boards that intermittently failed to boot or crashed later, so five or six months before the election we were adding cuts and jumpers to the boards.

Software-wise, they started out just fine (aside from whatever hacking you can do to Windows CE in a few minutes in a voting booth, with no keyboard, no floppy drive, and the touchscreen locked to the voting application), but then Georgia wanted the ballots in both English and Spanish. Somehow adding bi-lingual capability screwed up two unrelated features (the real-time clock interface and touchscreen sensing), and we didn't even discover the second problem until late in June.

Most of Diebold engineering is pretty good. Their main business is banking equipment, and those are pretty unforgiving customers. The drooling incompetents were the managers who:

1) Picked embedded Windows for a high-security application. This wasn't Diebold (originally), because they bought the design from Global Election Systems, and the first version of the software had GES logos all over the screens. But so far Diebold's managers haven't had the guts to take the obvious but expensive step of starting over with a secure OS...

2) Rushed a design they had bought from a third party to marketing and production without putting it through Diebold's grueling system of design qualification and testing.

3) Said "Sure, OK" about doing a last minute change to a bilingual ballot.

But IMO the stupidest decision of all was Georgia asking for a bilingual ballot. IF PEOPLE WON'T EVEN LEARN THE LANGUAGE OF THIS COUNTRY, THEY SHOULDN'T VOTE IN OUR ELECTIONS.

SomeCallMeTim,

We know the Bush administration authorized certain kinds of torture for
some captives, specifically:

"water-boarding," or dripping water into a wet cloth over a suspect's face,
which can feel like drowning;

threatening to bring in more-brutal interrogators from other nations;

this business of scaring with dogs;

and, I think, other things.

How do we know these things? Was it because of some incredible detective
work by some journalist somewhere?

No, we know because the Bush administration has told us so.

Now I'm filled with dismay to read these things. I think it was
a great mistake. I even think it's a pretty straightforward and
defensible speculation to think that this sort of thing going on and
the knowledge of it going on made it more likely that individuals
might do worse.

But the dismaying truth isn't enough, you want more. You, SomeCallMeTim,
whoever you are, want to believe that Abu Gharib was the policy of
the United States. And you don't merely want to believe that, you want
to con others into believing it is true.

You offer no evidence, just speculation. Just, it might be true. Well
I've got news for you, there's an almost infinite number of horrible
things that might be true and we don't normally eagerly believe
them.

I love conspiracy theories...always have, always will. Why? Because normal theories are proven or disproven by the evidence...while conspiracy theories depend on the lack of evidence:

"I know for a fact that the Boy Scouts of America are behind 9/11!"
"But there's not a scrap of evidence that points to that."
"Of course not, you deluded fool! The bastards are too clever for that!"

And I thought this thread was about voting machines...does everything around here have to devolve into a discussion about Abu Gharib? Or is that the loony left's new answer to everything: "You want fries with that?" "ABU GHARIB!!"

Well, I guess you can't answer everything with "Bushitler!" or "Haliburton!"...

Given the level of reaction many here have expressed concerning Diebold's CEO's statement re the election, I can only guess they were equally vocal about the potential for misleading or inaccurate news from CNN given Ted Turner's very transparent and vocal politics and support of specific candidates (especially during his Jane Fonda days).

Now, I haven't read up on any legitimate specific concerns with the actual equipment (thank you, markm, for an excellent run-down), but I get tired of what seems to me to be the refusal of the "left" to entertain the possibility that someone on the "right" can separate their personal and professional lives and responsibilities. Why is it so inconceivable to some that this CEO, regardless of his political position, would do his best to produce a fair, effective product? After all, the only motivations to do so are: stay out of jail, make a tidy profit, doing the right, fair and moral thing, fulfilling responsibilities to his employees in keeping the company going, ...

Perhaps it comes down to that old liberal saying, "the personal is the political". If one truly believes that everything done in one's life has political impact and behaves in a purposefully politically conscious manner, maybe using one's professional position and responsibilities to gain political advantage only seems natural. I certainly hope my extreme cynical analysis is just that.

SomeCallMeTim: It seems you are firmly entrenched in your beliefs vis-a-vis the Administrations, so I doubt my words will have any effect. That said, I will scream into the wind and give you a bit of my perspective on your numbered items:

1, 2. Put yourself in the President's position. 9/11 has happened and we are engaged in a war against people not only willing to die for their cause, but to kill themselbes in the process. Many people, even prominent defense lawyers such as Dershowitz, have raised the issue of using torture. I damn sure would want to have a clear understanding of what is and isn't torture. Lawyers all the time write memos from either one side or the other of an issue (that's what they're trained to do), and while the one side (torture and abuse are bad) was well understood, the other was very fuzzy. So how far can you go before an action becomes torture? That seems like a very good and valid question to ask. And, while they certainly would be wrong in a police station, the specific unconventional interrogation techniques I've seen referenced do not cross that line of causing severe or permenent harm, physically or mentally.

3. Read Sun Tzu some time. You want to control what your enemy knows, and the knowlege of a specific person in custody will affect their actions. In the surveilance business, submarines are often prized because, in addition to their other myriad benefits, they can observe without alerting the target to its presence. People will do things when they don't think they're being watched that they'd never dream of otherwise. Think about all the bad things that get caught on surveilance cameras.

4. I fail to see how you can interpret a man saying "investigate me fully" as being indicitive of a coverup or systemic failure. The only logical reading I can see of this is "I (and the system) have nothing to hide".

5. Again, I don't think "scaring" falls into that category of severe or permanent harm. Now, if a handler failed to adequately control his animal and actual injury resulted, he needs to held accountable.

6. Again, your logic fails me. We have a conspiracy to do something wrong, so we'll make sure and take photographs of it so there's plenty of evidence. Please explain how this follows.

7. A great deal of the news reports I've seen on abusive conduct range from the demonstrably wrong (remember the internet porno pics originally passed off as actual photos of rape by US service members?) to the uncorraborate "it happened to me, too" stories that basically amount to anecdotes by individuals without any investigation of either the content or motivations.

I would offer that you seem more predisposed to believe the words of random, unknown, often hostile anti-American individuals than the words of an open, elected government. If this is a factor of that government or your prejudices I will leave to you, but I'm sure you can deduce my opinion.

Mark:

We know that about the memos because journalists got their hands on the memos and published them. To date, Ashcroft refuses to turn the memos over to Congress (and Republican members refuse to subpoena them). If you are seriously arguing that the Bush White House has, generally, been a fount of information rather than the most secretive (secretive, not evil - this isn't a value judgment) WH since Nixon, then we live in vastly different universes.

I also note that what we've seen of Abu Gharib is not what worries me most; the torture memos, Padilla's case, and the "ghost prisoners" are. So I'm surprised that is the part that upsets you - I assume that there are worse stories out there that will come to light.

As to the rest - most of life is speculation. You evaluate the information, including questions of credibility, and then you place your bets. I really don't trust this Administration not to lie to us. Given the other evidence, I'll take the field as against them.

(I'm going to stop replying to this subject matter here - I'm feeling guilty about hijacking the comments thread. It really wasn't my intention, though I now realize it was a fairly probable result. If you want to continue, send me an e-mail).

subman,it is not just O'Dell's statement that is troubling, it is that combined with the fact that he is a Bush Pioneer (i.e. HUGE fundraiser) AND is CEO of a Company seeking to tally our votes. As I have said repeatedly, I thinks it possible, even probable that Diebold does not want to steal elections for the GOP. I don't buy into the the "machines are rigged" conspiracy. What bothers me is the appearance of bias, which should be avoided at all costs. Clearly, there is an appearance of bias here.
As for Ted Turner, your comparison is not well taken since 1) While outspoken, I have never heard him say anything about "delivering" electoral votes to anyone. O'Dell has made such a statement.
2) If you think CNN is biased and trying to deliver an election to a Democrat and/or liberal, you have options. You can watch Fox, CSPAN, read Newspapers, surf the net etc. for you news. If you think Diebold is biased/crooked and they have the contract for machines in your precinct, you have no choice but to use the machines.

Ah, yes, Tim. The "torture memos".

The ones where they asked a lawyer to tell them what they couldn't do under the treaties, and then set policy ... not doing those things they couldn't do under the treaties?

Bastards.

(Under the Geneva Conventions and their normal interpretation by the signatories, "being mean" is not "torture". None of the things I've heard about being actually authorised in the "torture memos" are, either. You know, in that pesky "legal" sense.)

Speaking of the appearance of impropriety, did anyone else notice that the Democrats will be honoring Ted Kennedy's long service during opening night of the convention, July 25th?

That would be 35 years to the day that Mary Jo Kopechne died....

Is the DNC really that dumb? The noise is the background is Karl Rove laughing....

Whoops - my bad. She died July 18. Ted's guilty plea was July 25th.....

Not that that doesn't stop Rove's laughing

Submandave,

Why is it so inconceivable to some that this CEO, regardless of his political position, would do his best to produce a fair, effective product?

True. Which is why it's a damn shame that everyone is focused on the shadowy conspiracy talk as opposed to the general incompetence of this company and the insurmountable and fundamental problems of any computerized voting system.

Which is why it's a damn shame that everyone is focused on the shadowy conspiracy talk as opposed to the general incompetence of this company and the insurmountable and fundamental problems of any computerized voting system.

Bushbot! How much are the NeoCons from $hrubCo paying you to say that?

But, seriously, the right should take this issue away from the loony bin over there on the left.

Submandave - Don't worry about somecallhimtimmy. We have in previous threads gone over this in detail. He chose not to "listen", "read", understand the English language. He did choose to continue to "twist", "spin", propagandize and lie about stuff. Here is a more concise way of dealing with his little list (of which is typical of liberals to do)...

1 and 2) There wasn't a "Torture Memo" by either entity. Any new person to politics can be assured that what SomecallhimTimmy is doing is calling a memo that tries to get to an understanding of boundaries something else.

3) Any new person to politics can be assured that if Rumsfeld admitted that we have "ghost" prisoners that that doesn't translate to mean that we or Rumsfeld had a "conspiracy to abuse prisoners" (intent to abuse people) as Timmy wants to try to say.

4 and 5)I didn't see and doubt since Timmy continues to get it wrong.

6) Photos did not point to a conspiracy from the top as the conversation is talking about the Diebold CEO. If an employee at Diebold took it upon themselves to shoplift while visiting Japan does that make it a conspiracy to abuse prisoners from the top (or conspiracy to shoplift by the CEO of Diebold?) According to Timmy yes I guess.

7)Yes. Increasing number of news stories. The New York Times took it upon themselves to have more consecutive front page stories than any other story since Watergate. So yes. Increasing number of stories since the NY times seems to have an agenda. I'm not sure how 6 bad apples warrants more consecutive front page stories (more than 28 - last report I saw)

I'm a bit tired I think you need to admit to more than being tired Timmy....

Eamon.

There is no APPEARANCE unless you can STRETCH your silly IMAGINATION to believe in some manner a conspiracy involving Diebold that would be pretty amazing. Are you silly? If not then there is not apperance to anyone not even you... :)

I fail to see how you can interpret a man saying "investigate me fully" as being indicitive of a coverup or systemic failure.

That does depend on the man. Gary Hart said something similar and later came to regret it.

You'll excuse me if I decide to trust my own judgment.

A more dangerous course of action was ne'er proposed, given what you have previously passed off on this forum as being "your judgment."

As for Jane, I'm sure she's just devastated.
Posted by Logical Reasoning Fairy

Given that Jane et al. were dead wrong about the war in Iraq (which was of course the substantive part of my post which you chose to elide), my judgment looks pretty damn good.

Jane,

Let me share something with you and your readers. I did my PhD dissertation on effectiveness of various group-psychological techniques for successfully pushing through a hidden agenda. We ran thousands of test groups where we had the groups vote on distributing a particular resource amongst themselves according to an arrived at consensus that they had to achieve by some means before they could vote. Among the groups, we would have a small minority of plants who would instigate a particular tactic. We would also take note of instigation of particular tactics (or similar enough ones) by subjects in the groups.

The main finding of our study was that suggesting there was a conspiracy was a surprisingly effective way for the alleged conspirators to reap disproportionate benefits. As this patten began to emerge, we would have two of our plants try to make their "conspiracy" obvious to others in the room and encourage its discussion by the group by denying it vehemently. Strangely enough, they would tend to get about 50% more of the resource in the end than they would if it were just split evenly among the group. And the electorate approved it.

This was small group dynamics, but could very well scale to conspiraces like Diebold. They may actually be fanning the flames so that they can get away with it easier.

This was small group dynamics, but could very well scale to conspiraces like Diebold. They may actually be fanning the flames so that they can get away with it easier.

Whoa.

The "Purloined Letter" dipsy-doodle? Hide it out in plain sight, so that everyone will think that there's nothing to it, but that's what we want them to think, so that they won't think what we don't want them to think, that we want them to think that we don't care what they think about we think they think we are doing?

Guys, I'm running very low on tinfoil...

OB, you are very close. If I were head of Diebold trying to run this conspiracy without getting caught, I would have purposely leaked the various memos so as to humanize us and galvanize opposition among the more radical fringe elements (like most posters to this thread). Let them get a little traction, like they did in California (1/8 of the electoral votes) where they banned all the machines for November and gave the counties little time to prepare anything else. Chaos is ensuing, and at the last minute, they will have to recertify the machines along with our emergency updates to address their concerns. We slip in our Naderize() routiine which examines a voter's vehicle ownership record, and bingo, W wins the state by the margin of voters who have ever driven a VW bus. Are you starting to see how things work here at Diebold Labs?

Gary Hart didn't exactly do much to "cover-up", did he? "Investigate me" could mean "no wrongdoing" or "I'm better at hiding than you are at seeking". Or, as in Hart's case, it means "I don't really want to be President, anyway."

On topic: For Diebold's "conspiracy" to work, it needs to include:
Whoever puts in the code "fixing" the election.
Whoever double-checks that code.
Alpha and Beta-testers, including probably testers chosen by the election authority(if they have any sense, this will be in the contract).
The CEO (presumably, anyway, someone to run the thing and run interference for the group above.)

That could be anyone from 5-25 people. It is possible a conspiracy this size could work, but not certain by any means. They also need the ability to conceal the code (from subpoena, after the election) if the result is challenged, or plausible deniability. That takes more people. The longer we go, the more likely someone will talk. It's what happens after the game is played that kills ya in conspiracies. (Were a deciding state found to have been won fraudulently after an election would create a constitutional crisis well beyond what happened in 2000, but impeachment or resignation would be probable. I wonder if the Supremes would overturn an electoral college result if a sufficiently large group of electors were found to be invalid.)

I apologize to Donald Rumsfield and company. It looks like I bought in to
a lie.

see http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/001849.php

Quote:

The White House and Pentagon are expected to release a series of memos
Tuesday related to U.S. military policy on prisoner interrogation and
the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal.

The release of the Pentagon memos will show that Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld never approved a controversial interrogation technique called
"water boarding," according to a source who had told CNN the opposite on Monday.

The senior defense official who provided the original information to CNN
now says Rumsfeld only approved "mild, noninjurious physical contact" with
a high-level al Qaeda detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and specifically
did not approve a request to use water boarding.

[and]

The list of requested aggressive tactics included:

* Use of scenario to convince the detainee that death or severe pain could
be imminent for him or his family

* Exposure to cold weather or water

* Use of a wet towel or dripping water to induce a perception of suffocating.

* And mild noninjurious physical contact such as grabbing someone's arm,
poking them in the chest or light shoving.

Only tactic number four, mild noninjurious physical contact, was approved.

[and]

Expect to see the memos roundly ignored by a national media that has
invested too much effort and ink into the notion that Rumsfeld and Bush
intended a full-scale rollback of the Geneva Conventions. While I am sure
they will cover the story, I suspect you'll need to look in the back end
of the news sections to read much about it, and the broadcast news services
will avoid it as much as possible.

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