Blame it on the machine...
Something smells... like Florida did eight years ago.
34 states affected, yet
Ohio caused their own problem??
From David Plouffe today:
Election Day isn't ahead of us -- it's already here.
Early voting has begun in eight states -- including the key battleground of Ohio, where voting begins today -- and it will be starting in a dozen more over the next two weeks.
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.
A nationwide customer alert with recommended actions
was issued Tuesday by Premier.
Approximately 1,750 jurisdictions use the flawed system. Both Maryland and Virginia use it, although
Virginia does not relay its votes to a central counting point, which is where the problem surfaces, Riggall said.
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.
Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has said no Ohio votes were lost because
the nine Ohio counties that found the problem caught it before primary results were finalized.
As recently as May, Premier said the problem was not of its making but
stemmed from anti-virus software that Ohio had installed on its machines.
It also briefly said the mistakes could have come from human mistakes. Further testing by Ohio elections officials and then high volume tests by Premier uncovered the programming error.
The mistake is not immediately apparent, Riggall said, and
would have to be caught when elections officials went to match how many memory cards they fed into a central database against how many show as being read by that database. Each card carries a unique marker.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/08/21/ohio_voting_machines_contained.html