Guest Blogged by John Gideon
In preparation for a May 2 primary, election officials in Summit Co., OH began testing their new ES&S optical scan voting machines. The Akron Beacon Journal announced today that ES&S has isolated the problem to a memory card made by one of their contractors.
The article also reveals that the county is not doing the testing themselves.
Why would a county that has to conduct elections on their own equipment allow a consulting company hired by the Secretary of State, do the testing?
The article goes on to explain the memory card problem in more detail:
Election Systems & Software in Omaha, Neb., makes the machines. Williams said ES&S officials believe they have isolated the problem to the computer cards produced by one of its subcontractors. ES&S contracts with several companies to make the memory cards, Williams said.
“We’re looking into the extent to which this affects others,” said Ellen Bogard, spokeswoman for ES&S. “It will be remedied if there are other cards that need to be replaced.”
The first 177 cards tested Monday worked flawlessly, Williams said. When testing began on the remaining 348 cards, however, the failure rate was so high that the rest were thrown out. ES&S had a second batch of cards sent to Akron on Tuesday, but Williams said those cards experienced a similar failure rate. He said a third batch is expected to arrive today.
Unanswered questions abound. How many other ES&S customers have these bad memory cards? How many of these other customers will go into elections without knowing that their memory cards are bad? How many of the problems with ES&S machines in Texas on Tuesday are a result of bad memory cards? Does ES&S have any Quality Control at all?
"Does ES&S have any Quality Control at all?"
Evidently not.
Like I said before, all these damn machines have to be gone, one way or another
Massive failures like that indicate that bad chips got in undetected. There must have been a batch of bad chips.
What worries me is that a card with just one bad chip will probably not be detected.
That means a failure could be missed during testing, but show up during an election.
Elections in american right now are not ready for computerization. Just the paper and the trail please.
Dredd, IMO, Them chips were put in there by design
wouldn’t you say?
The way my tin-foil hat is ringing right now, is that the plan is to screw up the machines so bad that we can’t have an election come November
When will the "Constitutional crisis" come into play?
I’ve heard them mention that before
I’ll take off my hat now, my ears are hurting
Has anyone thought about attacking these voting machines from the angle that since the software is proprietary, that the election is in fact not ‘fair and open’. I’ve been in programming since 1989, and as you all are probably aware, anything can be put in the code. The source should be public property, open to inspection by all interested parties. Otherwise, you have no idea what is in the source code (although most that visit Brad Blog have a pretty good idea). The elections are not open, and this must be remedied. Lawsuits should be filed ASAP. I think it’s a winning angle.
All electronic voting has to go the way of the square wheel, like all incumbents have to go,also. Electronic voting is a total failure. It lets illegal criminals vote,only the ones in office favor it.
I find this shocking
A shocking look at the Romanov murders
I also oneself something would want to find out on this theme. Very attentively I will read every post.