Russ McBee

Diebold (now called "Premier," since their previous name has become radioactive) has admitted that their electronic voting machines contain a critical flaw which can drop votes:

A voting system used in 34 states contains a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point, the manufacturer acknowledges.

The problem was identified after complaints from Ohio elections officials following the March primary there, but the logic error that is the root of the problem has been part of the software for 10 years, said Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold.

The flawed software is on both touch screen and optical scan voting machines made by Premier and the problem with vote counts is most likely to affect larger jurisdictions that feed many memory cards to a central counting database rapidly.

This flaw has existed for an entire decade, but they're just now admitting to it. Why? Are we supposed to believe it's taken that long to find the "bug", or did they just now get caught while knowing about it all along? Ignoring the fact that the "larger jurisdictions" mentioned above usually means "big cities that vote for Democrats," the following statement by the Diebold spokesman contradicts itself:

Riggall said he was "confident" that elections officials through the years would have realized votes had been dropped when they crosschecked their tallies to certify final elections results and would have reloaded cards so as not to lose votes.

If this flaw has existed for ten years, that means it was present during both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, yet we're supposed to believe it was only during a lower-turnout primary (with a correspondingly lower volume of uploaded data) that this flaw first manifested itself. That is transparent hogwash. Riggall's confidence is nothing but bluster, since the volume of uploaded data in 2000 or 2004 would have been substantially higher than during a March primary.

Unfortunately, the problem cannot be fixed by a software upgrade before November:

Unlike other software, the problem acknowledged by Premier cannot be fixed by sending out a coding fix to its customers because of federal rules for certifying election systems, Rigall said. Changes to systems must go through the Election Assistance Commission, he said, and take two years on average for certification and approval -- and that is apart from whatever approvals and reviews would be needed by each elections board throughout the country.

Although the article doesn't specify what steps are recommended by the company to remedy the problem, it sounds like they're merely recommending that election officials compare the vote totals recorded by the central database with those tallied by sign-in sheets at the precinct level. That's not a solution; it's a fig leaf.

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