Aftermath Of Failed Electronic Voting

dstates writes "The Christian Science Monitor and NPR report that failed electronic voting machines lost thousands of votes in Carteret County North Carolina, and the election for state agriculture commissioner is headed to court. A combination of human error (setting the machine to record a maximum of three thousand votes when eight thousand people voted) and a software malfunction (the machine kept accepting ballots after its memory was overloaded) resulted in the loss of 4,500 votes in an election decided by only 2,300 votes."

Time to find someone else?

[Markaci]

After all this crap, isn't it time that Diebold (and similar companies) be dropped, and another one (preferably FOSS) be chosen? Or is that solution too obvious? I wonder how many more elections fall victim to stupid and/or rigged coding....

Info on county's voting machines

[torndorff]

Here is some info on the voting machines used in the county.

Unilect Corportation [unilect.com] is the manufactorer of the "Patriot Voting System" (because losing votes = being patriotic).

Interactive demo [unilect.com] of their voting system!

Verified Voting [verifiedvoting.org] has a Voter Information Sheet on the machine.

Disinfopedia has an article [disinfopedia.org] about Unilect Corporation. From this article:

The President of UniLect Corporation is Jack Gerbel, who has been actively involved in the election equipment industry since 1965. His career began in elections with IBM Corporation and then as a founder, Vice-President and Board of Directors member of Computer Election Systems (CES).

Mr. Gerbel had the distinction of personally selling and installing more election systems than any other person in the U.S.

Two major accounts that he sold and successfully installed were Cook County, Illinois and the City of Chicago.

Mr. Gerbel became Vice-President of Sales for Business Records Corporation (BRC).

So, there you have it. Background info. Side note: I live in NC and this is not the same machines that were being (these are the literal words of the poll workers) "tested" in Watauga County. And although they officially said these machines were only experimental and being tested, paper ballots were often withheld upon request and their availability was NOT posted. The Republic Party in Watauga County also refused to move polling locations onto Appalachian State University's campus, proposed by the Dem Party, although 22,000 of the 25,000 residents are students.