Oh Look: Even More Lost Votes By Diebold/Premier

from the counting-votes-is-soooo-hard dept

Following last week's revelation of votes lost in California thanks to Premier (better known as Diebold) and its voting equipment, The Register points us to even more votes lost by Premier/Diebold machines in Ohio. Again, it was only because of a special, rare, spot check, which isn't commonly done with these machines, that the lost votes were noticed. And, as usual, Diebold... er... Premier downplayed the discovery:

"We have not seen this particular condition anywhere else in Ohio or anywhere else in the country."

Is it really that difficult for the company to admit that it screwed up? For quite some time now, pretty much every investigation and every more detailed look at any kind of e-voting equipment have turned up similar failures. For the company to brush it off because it hasn't seen "this particular condition" anywhere else is ridiculous. It does make you wonder, though, why anyone would ever buy such equipment and use it in an actual election.

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More Votes Lost By Diebold; Discovered By Unique Voting Transparency Project

from the reliable,-huh? dept

For years and years Diebold Election Systems (now Premier Election Solutions) had always vehemently denied that its e-voting or optical vote scanning machines had any problems -- despite mounds and mounds of evidence of problems. We were shocked, this past summer, when the company finally admitted to a glitch with some of its machines, but the company still downplayed the significance of this, claiming that it didn't believe the glitch (which loses votes) had actually impacted any elections.

Yet, even after this glitch was officially revealed, in the election just last month, we're now finding out that Diebold machines caused 200 lost votes in an election in California. Even worse, no one would even know about this at all if it weren't for a highly ambitious and very unique program set up by some voting activists to ensure there was real transparency. They convinced the local government to let them scan every single ballot and put it online for anyone to view. It was that separate process where they discovered the ballot counts didn't match, and that Diebold seemed to show absolutely no records of the missing ballots, despite having scanned them.

Makes you kinda wonder how many other areas lost votes that absolutely no one knows about because they didn't have such a system in place, huh?

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