OH: Broken (Diebold) Memory Card Blamed in Lost Ballots (Brunner's Audit Credited with Finding Them)

[Wilms]

Broken Memory Card Blamed in Lost Ballots

Issue raises questions about the reliability of Montgomery County's electronic voting machines. (Wilms notes: Ya think?!?)

By Lynn Hulsey

Staff Writer

Thursday, January 08, 2009

DAYTON — The maker of Montgomery County's electronic voting machines is blaming a damaged memory card for the loss of five ballots on Election Day.

Board of Elections Director Steve Harsman said Premier Election Solutions' (Wilms notes: pronounced, "Diebold") preliminary report, however, does not indicate how the card became damaged or, more importantly, why the company's software did not detect the problem or correct it.

The five missing ballots from a single precinct in Trotwood on Nov. 4 were discovered only because that precinct was one counted in a special audit of electronic voting machine results ordered statewide by Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner.

http://www.daytondailynews.com/n/content/oh/story/news/local/2009/01/08/ddn010809boe.html

[Bill Bored]

1. Well yeah, an audit would find stuff like that. nt

[diva77]

12. I wouldn't count on an audit to be a flawless check & balance on results

audits have been done improperly in several CA counties for years

[Wilms]

14. The same can be said about HCPB, so be careful what you argue.

Some of the precincts in NH that recently went to Optical Scan did so based on alleged counting errors.

I'm not happy about it. I even wonder if the hand count was rigged to defame HCPB. But if that's what happened, we're still stuck with a problem. Either the hand count was botched, or it was hacked to look like it was botched.

Hope this post didn't ruin your evening. :(

[Bill Bored]

15. Those ain't audits. They're "1% manual tallies."

And I'm still waiting to hear the results of the 10% one they did in CD-4 last year.

[Bill Bored]

2. And here's the rest of the story:

Montgomery County is the largest of 44 Ohio counties using the Premier machines, which earlier were scrapped by Cuyahoga County. Montgomery County paid $6.2 million for 2,500 machines in 2005. The machines made by Premier, then known as Diebold Election Systems, were among the few certified by former Secretary of State Ken Blackwell.

In 2006, local voting rights advocates discovered calibration problems with the machines here, and in the March 2008 primary, Montgomery and Butler counties found some votes did not properly upload to servers.

Montgomery County also has had problems with the paper records of ballots cast on the machines and with scanners that read paper ballots.

OMG!

[exboyfil]

3. I was alarmed after Florida that some areas were going to no paper

audit trail electronic systems. While optical scan ballots have some issues, they have proven to be the best overall system.

What we have seen in Minnesota is that optical scan ballots also have problems.

When you are dealing with +/- 200 votes out of 3 million, I don't think any voting system can have fine enough accuracy to truly decide a winner.

How about a force decision touch screen that prints out a ballot at the end which should be reviewed by the voter and dropped into a box? That has problems as well.

Any other suggestions for the best voting method?

[thunder rising]

4. For as much as those machines cost you'd think Quality control would be better.

I know it's MS and I'll bet that all the hardware is the cheapest shit they can assemble.

[RC]

5. That's not the problem. The problem is that the machines were designed to

help the repugs "win" elections. They keep people from voting. They "miss register" the vote. The breakdown are programmed in. The only transparent way to register votes is to use pencil and paper ballots and hand count them as Minnesota did with its recount.
We really need to go back to paper only ballots.

[eridani]

6. And another problem

Machines that only get used a couple of times a year never get the real world testing they need to get the bugs out.

[RC]

11. Those bugs were designed in on purpose.

Those voting machines are working, or not, as they are supposed to.

[Wilms]

13. You pretty much said that before. I asked if you can back it up.

If not, why not let it go at what we know is provable?

But if it makes you feel that much better...

[Wilms]

9. A lot of people say those things. I haven't seen proof for half of what you claim.

In fact, these machines are unreliable enough, insecure enough, and expensive enough, that everyone, Dem/Repub, could be up in arms about it.

What has happened, however, is that we've turned it into an easily dismissed partisan wing-nut argument of unsupported claims.

I regret that belief passes as truth.

I say, let's stick to verifiable facts when demanding verifiable elections.

[truckin]

7. Does anyone know if these are "Touch-screen" machines or scanners? nt

[Wilms]

8. According to verified voting, it's touch screen.

Diebold Accuvote-TSX

http://www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/map.php?state=Ohio&county=Montgomery&ec=allall&year=2008


It wouldn't surprise if the issue related to scanners, too, however.

[truckin]

10. Thanks Wilms