Cheat sheet

Wired gives us a follow-up story on the mystery of the Triad employee named Michael Barbian who, while examining a voting machine during the recount, spoke of data loss due to battery failure. This comment mystified many who wondered how a bad batery could affect the hard drive.

The tech's odd behavior was described in sworn testimony by Sherole Eaton, the deputy director of elections for Hocking County.

After days had passed, the president of Triad, Brett Rapp, finally came up with what seems like a good story:

He said that when the computer experienced "a CMOS error," indicating that the rechargeable battery on the motherboard had died, the computer had lost stored information about the hard drive's specifications, which it needed to make the computer boot up. No other data on the machine was lost.

He said Barbian took the case off the computer to identify the hard drive's make and model.

"He called our office, told us the model and we obtained the hard drive parameters by looking them up on the internet," Rapp said. "That's the information we gave him over the phone. He installed no patches on the computer system. He did not tamper with it. He simply fixed a piece of equipment that was broken." He said that Eaton must have misheard Barbian say he was going to put a patch on the machine.

That does not end the matter:

But Eaton took issue with Rapp's assertion that she misheard Barbian say he mentioned placing a patch on the computer, which, in computer terms means to install computer code on a machine.

"I wouldn't just come up with that. I don't use that term or know what it means," she said. She added that Barbian used the same word with the 70-year-old chair of Hocking County's elections board, who she said also wouldn't have come up with the term on his own.

Still, she does not believe that Barbian tampered with the machine.

"I have had, and still do have, complete trust in Triad," Eaton said. Eaton, who is 65 and by her own admission not computer-savvy, did not understand much of what Barbian did, and said that when he asked if he could take apart the computer, he had to ask for a screwdriver from one of the office workers. "He brought no tools with him," Eaton told Wired News, "which indicates to me that he wasn't planning on working on the machines."

Readers should come to their own conclusions as to whether the lack of a screwdriver indicates innocence of intention.

What seems far from innocent, however, is this portion of the affidavit, unmentioned by Rapp:

He advised Lisa and I on how to post a "cheat sheet" on the wall so that only the board members and staff would know about it and and what the codes meant so the count would come out perfect and we wouldn't have to do a full hand recount of the county.

Odd, isn't it, how Rapp refused to address the most striking part of the affidavit? If no data were lost, then what need of a cheat sheet?

Thanks to Newsclip Autopsy for bringing this one to our attention...