Aug 26 2008
Whoopsy! Diebold admits their software doesn’t count votes correctly
Okay, at this point the story’s been around — as it should be, because for heaven’s sake! — but I didn’t want you to think I’d missed it.
Diebold Election Solutions, which recently rebranded itself as Premier, has admitted that their software dropped “hundreds” of votes in Ohio’s March 2008 primary elections, and not because of any conflicts with antivirus software, either.
As previously mentioned here, Diebold/Premier originally blamed conflicts caused by antivirus software from McAfee Inc., but as Grant Gross writes for Computerworld, this week the company blames a logic error in the machines’ GEMS source code for the problem.
“We now have reason to believe that the logic error in the GEMS code can cause this event when no such antivirus program is installed on the server,” Premier President Dave Byrd wrote in a Tuesday letter to Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner. “We are indeed distressed that our previous analysis of this issue was in error.”
Wow, Brunner must have caught them seriously red-handed somehow.
“Numerous tests by voting authorities had failed to identify the logic error before Ohio discovered the dropped votes, Byrd wrote.” Uh-huh. What a surprising result — we all know how rigorous that testing has been.
Brunner thanked the board officials at the Butler County Board of Elections for going “above and beyond the call of duty” in tracking down the problems with the Diebold machines.
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