Honest Voting

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.

In Arizona, back in December 2007, Pima County Superior Judge Michael Miller ruled in favor of the Pima County Democratic Party, the party’s attorney Bill Risner, and AuditAZ, an election integrity group, in their suit to review the county’s electronic voting records for the 2006 primary and general elections.  This included copies of the Diebold GEMS databases.  (Reportedly this was the first ruling in the country to indicate that such data was a public record.)  The issue that originally concerned the activists was a 2006 regional transit bond vote that was behind in pre-election polls but won on election day.

In July 2008, Risner and the other activists reported that they’d received a written confession from a whistleblower who claimed that the chief computer programmer and operator for the Pima County Elections Division, Bryan Crane, confided to him in a bar conversation that he “fixed” the elections on orders from “his bosses” in the county.

Bill Risner wrote an article for Alternet a couple of weeks later that gives more details. Risner’s article includes not only a copy of a letter he wrote to Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, in which Risner asks the state to reopen its own investigation and recount the 2006 ballots, but a link to the whistleblower’s affidavit. I highly recommend reading this article, which appears to give copious details on how a state should not conduct an investigation into voting fraud. Risner points out that the investigation could easily have been skewed because county officials were involved in determining the scope and parameters of the study. It’s hard for me not to concur. If the records under review are sent to the chief election official being investigated, you’re doing it wrong. If the records subsequently disappear, that counts as a massive Fail.