There are days when you wonder how they get away with this stuff. In the latest example amongst many dramas with electronic voting machines in the USA, a major supplier of voting machines has admitted its system has a tendancy to delete votes after they've been scanned in.
"Premier has acknowledged that a problem with its software caused the system to delete votes. The company has apparently known about the problem since 2004 and provided some election officials with a workaround, though Humboldt County election director Carolyn Crnich said she'd never been told of the problem. The issue involved a programming error that caused ballots to be randomly dropped from the tabulation software, without providing any indication to officials running the system that it was doing so."
An election staffer apparently did read about the workaround in an email, but never told anyone else.
The error would never have been identified through the normal audit process, it's only because Humboldt "implemented the Transparency Project, whereby every paper ballot (Humboldt uses only paper ballots) gets digitally scanned by a separate commercial scanner, not made by a voting machine company, so that the ballot images can then be posted on the internet for anyone to examine and conduct their own independent recounts."
Serious Error in Diebold Voting Software Caused Lost Ballots in California County
'Humboldt Transparency Project' Reveals Diebold, U.S. Federal E-Voting Scam
Followups:
Humboldt At The Tipping Point: Who Dares Defend Diebold?
Four-year-old Diebold glitch silently drops votes
UPDATE:
The Registrar of Voters in Humboldt now says she is considering dropping the voting machines that caused so many problems.
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