Another Audit – Another Diebold Error

Ohio is conducting its first post-election audits. Like the recent audits in Humboldt, CA, and CT, the Ohio audit has uncovered discrepancies in the machine and manual counts. Here is one of the stories, by Kim Zetter at Wired <read>

Montgomery County officials discovered that although the five votes were recorded to a memory card inside the voting machine, the votes weren’t counted by the tabulation software when the memory card was uploaded to the tabulation server. Premier’s Global Election Management System (or GEMS) is the tabulation software that counts votes from memory cards.

We also note the excellent comments of John Gideon of VotersUnite <read>

What does Diebold/Premier have to say? “We have not seen this particular condition anywhere else in Ohio or anywhere else in the country,” according to spokesman Chris Riggall. Clearly Riggall is joking. Of course they haven’t seen this condition in Ohio because Ohio has not done these audits in the past and the lack of audits across most of the rest of the country would ensure that no problems would have been found in the past. Where there are audits that may have found this condition, the condition is ignored or just shrugged-off. What they ignore is that there is federal law that dictates accuracy of voting systems and even the loss of these 5 ballots in a county that saw over 280,000 ballots cast is a violation of that law

What does this Diebold error mean for Connecticut?

• We don’t use the GEMS system for this particular function, so we are immune to this particular error.
• Yet, once again Diebold/Premier is the company we keep. The company we trust with our democracy. We are vulnerable to other potential errors in GEMS and the AccuVote-OS scanners, undiscovered or as yet undisclosed by Diebold. This is the third Diebold error discovered in the last few months.
• We cannot vouch for the details of federal law, however, our official Connecticut audit reports show a much larger rate of ballot discrepancies between the machine counts and manual counts.
• When discrepancies are found in Connecticut they are dismissed, as many believe that our election officials cannot count accurately and that Diebold/Premier/LHS machines and people always produce accurate results.