Have King County (WA) voters been Diebolded?

[pnwmom]

This Secy of State site seems to indicate that our optical scan machines have been replaced by a Diebold system that is not optical scan. Does anyone know anything about this?

http://www.secstate.wa.gov/elections/votingsystems.aspx

The site contains a list of all counties in Washington and their voting methods, in case anyone else is interested. For King County, it says:

King Global Accuvote Certification Diebold Election Systems DRE/AccuVote TSX

[upi402]

1. Just got my absentee ballot and am worried on 2 counts

These may be worth peoples time if it saves any of us from rejected ballots;

1) There's an edge on my mail-in ballot that is tearing/frayed in the center of its 3 folds. Will it hang up in the reader?

2) The ballot requires extra postage due to larger size. The only 2 languages are english and chinese on the notice card. Anyone know why chinese is the 2nd language when it isn't the dominant non-english speaking group?

I posted this in GD just in case it's some kind of new method of rejecting known Democrat ballots in known liberal areas.

[pnwmom]

2. What is #2 language in King County? All I remember is that it isn't

Spanish. (That was something like #5)

[upi402]

3. It must be a proficiency in english issue

There are many Asian groups, Chinese is only one. However, the KC General Elections Journal online says something about the 2000 census showing enough Chinese have language proficiency around 5th grade or below. Must be it cuz there aren't that many Chinese here, or are there?

Asians and Pacific Islanders = 13 percent. They're Seattle's largest minority. In the International District and parts of Rainier Valley and Beacon Hill they're at least half the population.

[pnwmom]

4. Actually, there are a lot of Chinese immigrants. In Bellevue, the most

common foreign-born group is the Chinese.

I saw something that said in the 1990's, in King County, the #1 group was from Vietnam. I'll add to this post if I can find it again.

[upi402]

5. Gary Locke was Chinese and active in recruiting poll workers

It's wonderful and fine, as long as it isn't a corporatist/Republican corrupt practice.

[upi402]

6. Got the answer;

<...King County is required by Federal Law to provide election materials in Chinese because of the number of Chinese speaking citizens identified in the 2000 U.S. Census (Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act (42 U.S.C., 1973aa-1a). In the 2000 Census, 10,535 Chinese American, voting age citizens indicated that they have limited English proficiency and that their English literacy rate is below that of the national standard (5th Grade). No other limited-English proficiency group was identified as meeting the federal threshold for minority language voter assistance in King County during the 2000 Census.>

http://www.metrokc.gov/elections/news/2005_10_25.htm

[pnwmom]

7. Has anyone here used one of these Diebold machines?

Do they produce a paper receipt?

[eridani]

8. Touchscreens were bought only for use by disabled people

Motivation for actual cheating is reduced by relatively low payback per effort, but it's still a beta test, which is unfortunate.

Everybody else, whether at polls or absentee voting, will use optical scan with paper ballots. I don't like it that the tabulation software is a trade secret, but we did have ths most extensive audit possible in the 2004 gubernatorial race, where two machine counts and one hand count were within 0.1% of each other. Too bad that that was also roughly the percent difference between the two candidates.