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News Archive |
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Friday, 06 March 2009
Computerworld.com reported this week that a new report from the California secretary of state sheds light on allegations raised last November, when nearly 200 Humboldt County, Calif., votes were not tabulated during the presidential election.
The report claims that voting machines manufactured by Diebold Inc. subsidiary Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold Elections Systems, are equipped with a button that can be used to delete audit logs — audit logs that the federal government requires to be stored permanently on the voting system. The report also claims that the voting kiosks failed to maintain required logs of important system events and generated inaccurate data and time stamps in several cases.
The voting kiosks have a history of controversy.
In August 2003, former Diebold chief executive Walden O'Dell publically expressed support for then President George W. Bush and said Diebold would help "give" Bush the election. Shortly after his statements were made public, issues regarding the accuracy of the Diebold voting machines' tabulations began surfacing.
O'Dell resigned in 2005, facing allegations of insider trading. After subsequent allegations that the voting kiosks were providing inaccurate vote talleys, Diebold attempted to sell the voting division, but failed to shake the troubled business unit. In August 2007, the company rebranded the division to help distance itself from the controversy.
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Tuesday, 27 January 2009
(Wash.) TriCityHerald.com: The Walla Walla office of the State's Department of Licensing will be open another 18 months after elected officials urged the agency to reconsider closing it this year. The Walla Walla location is one of 25 licensing offices statewide scheduled to close between March of this year and April 2010 to help remedy the state's nearly $6 billion shortfall. One of the possible solutions to lessen the effect of closures is to install self-service kiosks at select locations, particularly in offices where people renew car tabs, said Gigi Zenk, communications director for the agency. But finding locations for those kiosks appeared to be more challenging in Walla Walla, which is a big reason for postponing the closure, she said.
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Wednesday, 17 December 2008
Montgomery (Alabama) Advertiser: Alabama's top election official is looking for a better system for military members stationed overseas to vote, and she may have just found one. Alabama Secretary of State Beth Chapman recently heard a presentation by Pat Hollarn, supervisor of elections for Okaloosa County in Florida, on an Internet voting pilot program she ran earlier this year. The program involved the use of secure Internet voting kiosks deployed in England, Germany and Japan. Chapman says she's eyeing the results of that program closely and may adopt something similar for her state.
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Monday, 27 October 2008
Air Force Times: About 400 military and other overseas voters who are registered in Okaloosa County, Fla., can now vote at electronic kiosks in Mildenhall, England, and Ramstein, Germany, in a pilot project. The kiosks opened Friday, said Carol Paquette, project manager for the Okaloosa Distance Balloting Pilot Project.
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Monday, 27 October 2008
ComputerWorld: As the 2008 Presidential Election looms ever closer, voters are casting a wary eye toward the electronic voting machine kiosks that have caused so much division in the past. ComputerWorld has compiled a list of bloggers who have weighed in on the possibility of malfunction or voter fraud this election.
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Thursday, 04 September 2008
NORTH CANTON, Ohio — The 2005 lawsuit filed against Diebold Inc. by five shareholders has been dismissed.
The suit had alleged that Diebold violated U.S. securities laws and was unable to assure the quality and working order of its voting-machine products.
According to a news release, the cases, which also named certain current and former Diebold officers and directors, alleged violations of federal securities laws. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio dismissed the cases Aug. 22 and entered a judgment in favor of Diebold and the other defendants.
A separate class action suit against Diebold and certain current and former officers and directors filed by participants in the company's 401(k) plan — alleging breaches of duties under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 — remains open.
Wednesday, 20 August 2008
USA Today: The demise of touchscreen voting has produced a graveyard of expensive corpses: Warehouses stacked with thousands of carefully wrapped voting machines that have been shelved because of doubts about vanishing votes and vulnerability to hackers. What to do with this high-tech junkyard is a multimillion-dollar question. One manufacturer offered $1 a piece to take back its ATM-like machines. Some states are offering the devices for sale on eBay and craigslist. Others hope to sell their inventories to Third-World countries or salvage them for scrap.
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Tuesday, 10 June 2008
The (Cleveland, Ohio) Plain Dealer: Premier Election Solutions, the voting machine company Cuyahoga County might sue for selling equipment that had been discarded, has struck first, filing its own lawsuit. Premier, part of Diebold Inc., is asking Franklin County Common Pleas Court to rule that the company fulfilled its contracts with Cuyahoga and the state.
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Friday, 21 March 2008
The Associated Press: State lawmakers killed a proposal on Thursday that would have forced counties to conduct paper ballot elections this year, freeing them to use their controversial electronic voting kiosks. Colorado was one of five states considering moving to paper because of questions about electronic equipment. The reversal essentially puts the state back to where it was in December, before Coffman decertified most of the computerized voting equipment and optical scanners used in the state because of security and accuracy concerns. U.S. Election Assistance Commission Chairwoman Rosemary Rodriguez of Denver said the measure lets states use money to equip electronic machines with paper receipt printers and doesn't endorse any voting system over another.
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Tuesday, 18 March 2008
The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch: When Jennifer Brunner cast her vote last fall, she is certain she saw something so odd on her touchscreen voting machine that it prompted a state criminal investigation into the Franklin County Board of Elections. Brunner isn't the average voter. As secretary of state, she is in charge of making sure Ohio's elections are properly conducted. At least 15 of the county's electronic machines are under double-lock at a warehouse. It is being treated as a crime scene. County elections officials asked the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation to seize the machines during the investigation by Attorney General Marc Dann and forensics consultants. Investigators already have found that many of the county's voting machines weren't tested before the November election, and a function that tracked changes to the machines was purposely turned off.
Monday, 07 January 2008
The New York Times: After the 2000 election, counties around the United States rushed to buy new computerized voting machines. But it turns out that these machines may cause problems worse than hanging chads. The questions about voting touchscreens continue as the 2008 presidential election looms.
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Wednesday, 19 December 2007
Associated Press: Colorado's secretary of state has declared many of the state's electronic voting machines to be unreliable, but said that some of them still could be used in November if a software patch was installed. Other machines that failed could be replaced with equipment certified for use in other states, Secretary of State Mike Coffman said. Coffman recently met with a task force of state lawmakers to discuss what Colorado should do after he decertified three of the four voting equipment manufacturers allowed in the state, affecting six of Colorado's 10 most populous counties.
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Wednesday, 05 December 2007
Sandusky (Ohio) Register: Many election boards in Ohio have not handled that responsibility well. It's time for the Ohio General Assembly to mandate that all 88 counties use optical-scan voting technology and end the irresponsible experimentation with touchscreen voting machines. Erie County's election board has been wise in choosing its voting system. Erie County uses optical-scan voting machines. That means voters mark their choices on paper ballots, which are then counted by electronic ballot scanning machines. The system is fast and provides for a quick count of election results.
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Wednesday, 28 November 2007
American Enterprise Institute: One of the issues left hanging as Congress is off on recess is the Holt bill to require voter-verifiable paper trails on all voting machines. The bill remains mired in controversy, in part because of the opposition of sizable numbers of election officials who, after having sunk a bundle of money into touchscreen machines after the passage of the Help America Vote Act, are not inclined to change (and are also worried about deadlines and technical glitches). What to do? Frankly, we can't count on Congress to solve the problems, at least in the foreseeable future. We need a patriotic intervention by Steve Jobs and his talented team at Apple, the geniuses who created intuitive, user-friendly, reliable and elegant successes like the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone, or by Eric Schmidt and his brilliant team at Google.
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Monday, 12 November 2007
Star and Stripes: Some registered Florida voters will be able to forgo the difficulty of voting overseas with the introduction of voting kiosks at three Air Force bases in Europe and Asia. Voters registered in Okaloosa County, Fla., will be able to use the kiosks to vote via a secure Internet connection. The kiosks will be largely aesthetic, mimicking that back-home experience.
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Monday, 05 November 2007
Time: It is hard to believe now what a darling touchscreen voting was seven years ago. After the Florida presidential vote recount debacle, electronic voting was embraced as the way back from America's electoral humiliation. Some 50,000 touchscreen machines were bought in 37 states at a cost of almost a quarter of a billion dollars. The reversal since then couldn't be more stunning · as indicated by a bill in Congress introduced recently by Florida Senator Bill Nelson and Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, which would ban touchscreen voting in federal elections starting in 2012.
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Friday, 05 October 2007
Wired: The Government Accountability Office, which has been looking into what happened to about 18,000 votes in a controversial Florida election, released a preliminary report saying it can't exclude the possibility that touchscreen voting machines were responsible for the undervotes in that race. The GAO says that initial tests on the voting machines conducted by Florida election officials after the election were insufficient and that the GAO needs to conduct more tests.
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Wednesday, 12 September 2007
San Diego Union Tribune: Amid the ongoing controversy about the security of electronic voting machines, the vast majority of California voters have some degree of confidence that their votes are being counted accurately, according to a new Field Poll. In August, Secretary of State Debra Bowen banned most touchscreen voting machines in California "to begin rebuilding the voter confidence in the systems we use to conduct elections."� The Field Poll indicates that voter confidence already is fairly high among likely voters.
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Friday, 24 August 2007
HD NET: Dan Rather Reports presents conclusive evidence of the failure of touchscreen voting machines across the country. The episode, "The Trouble with Touch Screens," is an hour devoted to new information about e-voting. From scientists involved in testing the equipment, to manufacturers in third-world countries that have shipped defective voting machines to the United States, the program shows how defective machines may have altered the outcome of multiple elections.
To watch the video click here.
Thursday, 09 August 2007
KCCI-TV, Channel 8 (Des Moines, Iowa): This Iowa Republican Straw poll is being challenged. That comes from a national group that is threatening legal action over the voting machines that the Republican Party of Iowa is using.
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Friday, 04 May 2007
The New York Times: Florida legislators voted on Thursday to replace touchscreen voting machines that were installed in 15 counties after the troubled 2000 presidential election. Florida will be reverting back to an optical scan voting system. The new system is scheduled to be running in time for the 2008 presidential election.
The move is the nation's biggest repudiation of touchscreen voting, which was embraced after the 2000 recount as a way to restore confidence that every vote would count. But the reliability of touchscreen machines has increasingly come under scrutiny, as has the difficulty of doing recounts without a paper trail.
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Thursday, 01 February 2007
Reuters: Florida Gov. Charlie Crist on Wednesday said he would propose abandoning touchscreen-voting machines adopted after the disputed 2000 presidential race and replacing them with devices that provide a paper record.
In response to intense criticism over the 2000 race · when a recount dispute focusing Florida's "hanging chads" and inscrutable ballots was resolved by the Supreme Court · election supervisors in 15 counties spent millions on touchscreen technology, which itself has come under fire.
Thursday, 28 December 2006
HeraldTribune.com: The final phase of a state inquiry into whether the 18,000 undervotes in Florida's District 13 congressional election were the product of a touchscreen voting-machine malfunction has begun. State election officials pulled computer chips from a random sample of Sarasota County's iVotronic voting machines to take to Tallahassee for analysis.
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Thursday, 21 December 2006
Guardian Unlimited: The paper ballots and hanging chads that marred the 2000 presidential election have almost vanished from polling places, replaced by electronic-voting machines that are supposed to eliminate recount chaos. But now election directors have a new worry: printer jams.
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Tuesday, 12 December 2006
Miami Herald: A state test of voting machines in Sarasota failed to resolve the mystery of the missing 18,000 votes in the tightly contested congressional race between Democrat Christine Jennings and Republican Vern Buchanan.
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Tuesday, 12 December 2006
Palm Beach Post: A circuit judge will hold a hearing Dec. 19 to determine whether the voting machine maker in a disputed congressional election will have to let others examine the machine's software source code for possible glitches.
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Thursday, 16 November 2006
Examiner.com: Citing the disputed vote in a Florida congressional district, a Democratic lawmaker on Wednesday urged Congress to approve his measure requiring a paper trail for touchscreen voting. Rep. Rush Holt, sponsor of the bill, said the inaccuracy of electronic touchscreen voting machines "poses a direct threat to the integrity of our electoral system." The New Jersey congressman argued the Florida district, in which more than 18,000 votes have gone uncounted, has exposed the system's flaws.
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Monday, 13 November 2006
The Philadelphia Inquirer: There wasn't a hanging chad in sight Tuesday, as millions of Americans voted on high-tech voting equipment · many for the first time. Nearly 90 percent of all voters stepped up to ATM-style or optical scanning machines. That's a remarkable transformation from the days after the 2000 election, when massive voting problems with paper ballots in Florida left the presidential election in doubt.
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Wednesday, 08 November 2006
CNN.com: Police arrested a voter after he smashed a voting machine. Officials said votes cast on the machine were not lost.
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Tuesday, 07 November 2006
MSNBC.com: Members of the Florida Fair Elections Coalition said Monday they don't expect votes to be counted accurately and attacked what they see as a series of election problems. Hackers and computer programmers can rig electronic touchscreen machines to flip votes from one candidate to another, they said.
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Tuesday, 07 November 2006
TheLedger.com: Electronic voting machine problems frazzled voters and election workers in dozens of precincts as the polls opened Tuesday, delaying voters in Indiana and Ohio and leaving some in Florida with little choice but turn to paper ballots instead.
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Tuesday, 26 September 2006
The New York Times: A growing number of state and local officials are getting cold feet about electronic voting technology, and many are making last-minute efforts to limit or reverse the rollout of new machines in the November elections.
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Tuesday, 27 June 2006
WASHINGTON -- Most of the electronic voting machines widely adopted since the disputed 2000 presidential election "pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state and local elections," a report concludes.
There are more than 120 security threats to the three most commonly purchased electronic voting systems, the study by the Brennan Center for Justice says. For what it calls the most comprehensive review of its kind, the New York City-based non-partisan think tank convened a task force of election officials, computer scientists and security experts to study e-voting vulnerabilities.
Read more.
Friday, 31 March 2006
ALLEN, Texas -- Sixty-three Illinois counties deployed optical scan and touch-screen voting stations from Diebold Election Systems for the March primary election with positive results. The majority of the counties had already used Diebold's optical scan system for several years. However, this was the first Illinois election in which Diebold's touch-screen voting station with a voter-verifiable paper audit trail printer was used, enabling blind and physically challenged voters to cast their ballot privately and independently, meeting Help America Vote Act requirements.
A total of 5,300 Diebold touch-screen and optical scan voting stations were deployed by Illinois jurisdictions for the primary election. More than two million registered voters in nearly 3,000 precincts had the opportunity to vote on Diebold machines during the election.
DuPage County, the second largest county in Illinois with more than 550,000 registered voters, was the largest Illinois jurisdiction to use Diebold's voting solutions. DuPage County deployed approximately 340 optical scan and 340 touch-screen units.
"Our Diebold system performed commendably, was well accepted by the voters of DuPage County and enabled us to effectively meet federal accessibility requirements," stated Robert Saar, Executive Director of the DuPage County Elections Commission. "The March primary election was the first time DuPage County offered early voting to our electorate, and the touch-screen systems were used to record ballot selections from all early voters. The touch-screen stations with voter-verifiable paper audit trail printers were very well received by voters, and the paper audit trail proved to be reliable and 100 percent accurate, as verified by our post-election recount. Tabulation of early voting and election day optical scan and touch-screen results was an easy process with Diebold's unified election management software."
Diebold Election Systems, Inc. is a wholly owned operating subsidiary of Diebold, Incorporated (NYSE: DBD), a global leader in providing integrated self-service delivery systems and services. Headquartered in Allen, Texas, Diebold Election Systems provides high-quality voting technology to jurisdictions of all sizes, along with comprehensive service and support capability, and is committed to elections accuracy, security and integrity. For more information on Diebold Election Systems, visit the company's Web site at http://www.dieboldes.com, or call 1-800-433-VOTE.
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