Triad left unofficial Ohio results on website

By John Byrne | RAW STORY Editor   15 December 2004

Triad Governmental Systems, the firm accused by a county employee of tampering with tabulating machines and attempting to plant false information into the Ohio recount, left some unofficial results publicly available on their website, RAW STORY has learned.

The firm left the unofficial results of at least two counties ? Lorain and Madison ? available as text files on their corporate website. Both counties show ?unofficial cumulative results? from the eleven p.m. to one a.m. hour on Election Day and Nov. 3.

The votes at those times closely correlate with the final reported results.

When told of the results, a Triad spokesman paused for several seconds before responding. The spokesman declined to give his name.

?Generally the only purpose of that on election night is that counties used to get inundated with calls,? he said. If someone calls, he said, ?they say just look at the website and you?ll see what the unofficial count is.?

But the spokesman declined to answer why the unofficial results was posted on the firm?s website. When pressed, he hung up, saying, ?have a nice day.?

Ohio?s Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell also posted unofficial results on Election Day and the days following the election on the state?s website. This is the only known incident of a private firm publishing unofficial Ohio results on their own site.

Triad also posted official election results in their root IP domain 66.241.236.181 dated in various days in November and December for the Ohio counties of Ashtabula, Brown, Clinton, Darke, Greene, Preble and Union.

A Triad employee was accused Tuesday of ?inappropriate and likely illegal election tampering? by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich) in the New York Times. After the alleged tampering took place, the state decided to recount another county for the
  
Ohio recount, the Times reported.

The employee asserts that the Triad representative showed up announced, saying he hoped to answer questions, and proceeded to dismantle a computer used for tabulating. She also said that the technician made additional changes after she informed him that her county was being used as a test county in the Ohio state recount, which is currently underway.

Triad provides voting systems to nearly half of the state, including systems that count paper ballots. Together with another company, ES&S, the two firms make up for 80 percent voting tabulation systems of Ohio?s counties.