Report: E-Voting companies being charged with counting votes

Although many states have rejected electronic voting machines because of their vulnerability to errors and outright fraud, a third of the nation will still be using them this fall.

What's worse, notes CNN's Lou Dobbs, "a new report says election officials often are outsourcing their responsibilities to the very companies that make the e-voting machines, even trusting those companies to count the votes."

That report (pdf) was issued by voting rights group VotersUnite.Org, whose founder Ellen Theisen told CNN, "Elections should be accountable to the people and run by public officials who are selected by the people. ... When that's handed over to private vendors, these public elections are no longer public."

The problem is particularly serious when voting machine companies also tabulate the votes, because the companies own both the equipment and the propriety software which runs it and election officials have no way of double-checking their tally.

The VotersUnite report concludes, "The depth of the current dependence is shocking, but even more shocking is the fact that our elections are dependent on vendors whose records reveal their unethical and even unlawful behavior, as well as their incompetence."

Oklahoma is one state which owns its own voting system and wasn't tempted by the offer of federal funds in 2002 to switch over to a proprietary system. "There was really nothing on the market we would buy then," Michael Clingman of the Oklahoma State Election Board told CNN, "and there's still nothing we would want to buy today."

"Oklahoma is a real piece of America!" Dobbs commented approvingly. "They're telling these silly son-of-a-guns to go stick it -- and they're honoring a commitment to the public."


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The Hidden Campaign
Ohio Voting Machines Contained Programming Error That Dropped Votes
By Mary Pat Flaherty

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.

mas...