Serious Error in Diebold Voting Software Caused Lost Ballots in California County

“An investigation shows that the paper mail-in ballots were
scanned properly by officials into the central-count optical-scan
system made by Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold
Election Systems) — a receipt printed out by the machine at the
time they were scanned on November 1, three days before the
election, indicates that the machine recorded the ballots. The
ballots even showed up in preliminary tallies counted on election
night on November 4 and in a report printed out on November 23. But
some time after this point, the tabulation software inexplicably
deleted the ballots without election officials ever knowing.

“Premier has acknowledged that a problem with its software
caused the system to delete votes. The company has apparently known
about the problem since 2004 and provided some election officials
with a workaround, though Humboldt County election director Carolyn
Crnich said she’d never been told of the problem. The issue
involved a programming error that caused ballots to be randomly
dropped from the tabulation software, without providing any
indication to officials running the system that it was doing
so.”

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