- The oldest West Coast customer of Diebold Election Systems
is calling company exec-utives on the carpet today, citing "disappointment
and dissatisfaction" with Diebold voting equipment.
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- Alameda County, the first and, until recently, largest
user of Diebold touchscreen voting machines in California, warned the McKinney,
Texas, firm this week that it is "not adequately performing its obligations."
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- Voting industry observers say the warning marks perhaps
the first time that a U.S. county has lodged a formal contract complaint
with a manufacturer of electronic voting systems.
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- After his phone inquiries to Diebold went unanswered,
Alameda County Registrar of Voters Bradley J. Clark wrote a letter Monday
invoking the performance clause of the county's $12.7 million contract.
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- He demanded Diebold deliver within 10 days a written
plan to correct multiple problems, foremost of which was forcing the county
to use poorly tested, uncertified voter-card encoders that broke down in
200 polling places March 2.
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- Diebold executives agreed to a meeting today. The company
did not respond to inquiries Tuesday.
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- Alameda County Counsel Richard Winnie shied from talk
of legal action. "We're going to take this step by step," he
said. "We're very serious about making sure we don't have problems
like this in the future."
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- Clark's letter revealed a greater array of problems with
Diebold equipment and ballot-printing services than the county previously
has acknowledged.
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- The most serious and well-known -- the large-scale failure
of electronic devices used to produce ballot-access cards for voters --
delayed Super Tues-day voting at 200 polling places in Alameda County and
more than 560 in San Diego County. When paper ballots ran out, hundreds
of voters were turned away.
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- Diebold officials have blamed the encoder failures on
drained batteries. Yet poll workers have told the Oakland Tribune and Clark's
office that they kept the encoders fully charged only to see them fail
for varying periods of time on the morning of the election.
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- For the first time, Clark's letter suggests Alameda County
also had unspecified "programming problems" in the Democratic
and American Indepen-dent Party presidential primaries. The registrar did
not respond immediately to inquiries Tuesday about those problems.
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- Clark also made note of "absentee ballot problems,"
a reference to a glitch in the Oct. 7 recall election that mysteriously
awarded thousands of absentee votes for Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante
to Southern California Socialist John Bur-ton. A Diebold technician changed
the votes based on examination of the paper ballots and scanned ballot
images.
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- "I am sure that it was fixed because of the hand
counts that we did," Clark said in a recent e-mail, "but I was
not satisfied with the answers as to why it happened."
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- Diebold's explanations have ranged from a corrupted candidate
database to a bad vote-counting server.
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- Contrary to its agreement with Alameda County, Diebold
also has failed to supply certified software and hardware. State elections
officials found uncertified voting software running last fall in Alameda
and all other counties that Diebold serves.
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- But it was the failure of the voter-card encoders that
underscored Diebold's lapses in getting its systems tested, nation-ally
qualified and state-certified. Diebold submitted its encoders too late,
and with the primary days away, counties such as Alameda and San Diego
had few other options but to use them despite the lack of testing for reliability
and durability.
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- "We look forward to a candid and complete discussion
of our concerns," Clark wrote. He demanded that company executives
provide written assur-ances "of Diebold's ability and honest commitment
to this contract and to a prompt and comprehensive solution to the many
problems we have experienced."
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- Voting industry experts say contract disputes with voting
system vendors are exceedingly rare.
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- Elections officials and vendors largely have maintained
a united front against critics of electronic voting, calling claims of
poor security overblown. Together, vendors and elections officials have
cautioned that those criticisms risk undermining the trust of voters.
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- But more recently, state and local elections officials
have begun to question whether the industry's top players -- Election Systems
& Software and Diebold Election Systems -- also are imperiling that
trust by deploying untested, uncertified voting software and hardware in
the 2004 elections.
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- Two weeks ago, the Indiana Election Commission lambasted
industry leader Election Systems & Software for installing unapproved
software in four counties' electronic voting machines. The panel required
Omaha-based ES&S to post a $10 million bond in case four Indiana counties
were sued for using the software in the May primary.
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- Gradually, said voting systems consultant Kimball Brace,
U.S. counties are holding vendors to their commitments.
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- But industry experts and e-voting critics could not recall
any other U.S. county notifying a vendor in writing of failure to perform
under its contract.
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- "That's quite a substantial letter," said David
Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and a
member of a state task force on touchscreen voting.
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- That's the way it should be, Jefferson said. This is
a contractor relationship and contractors are expected to perform, even
if their machines were not at the center of the democratic process.
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