Bruce Funk was just trying to do his job! The County Clerk of Emery County, Utah for 23 years, Funk was locked out of his office and forced to resign. Why? Because he had the temerity to question whether the Diebold voting machines his county had purchased were accurate, and brought in an outside expert who in fact verified that the machines were highly manipulable and had insufficient backup.

The initial thing that led me to getting a hold of Black Box Voting was that when I re-examined the machine, I found a number of them with insufficient backup memory, some as little as four megabytes, whereas a normal machine had anywhere from 27 to 29 megabytes…

Something was worked out that if they could terminate me as the election official of Emery County, then they would recertify the machines. And so they changed my locks, effective April 1, and locked me out of my office.

This is an outrage! There have been so many election irregularities in both the 2000 and the 2004 elections that there has been a cloud of illegitimacy over the GWB administration from the beginning (a cloud made darker by the consistent misbehavior of this administration once it got into office: a sordid history of vindictive reprisals, lavish favors to friends and special interests, not just a reluctance to hear criticism but constant attacks on those who criticize, and so forth.

And yet when an a election official who has very good reason to be concerned–who knows that the backup memory is inadequate if, for instance, the plug gets knocked out of the wall socket–asks an expert to investigate, he loses his job.

Is this the America that claims to be a beacon of democracy around the world?

Shameful!