Election chiefs warned about voting 'glitch'
Paige St. John   Pensacola News Journal    29 January 2008

TALLAHASSEE Florida county election supervisors were warned just last week about an "intermittent" glitch in their optical scan voting machines.

Records obtained by Gannett show Diebold Election Systems which has changed its name to Premier Election Solutions sent county election officials a "product advisory note" on Friday about its AccuVote optical scan systems. There are 32 Florida counties that use the Diebold voting machines.

The letter warns that no error message will appear when a ballot fails to pass through the machine. In those cases, the scanner will simply stop working, the stuck ballot left inside, uncounted.

That's different than other paper jams, which tell precinct workers whether the ballot was counted.

Sarasota County Election Supervisor Kathy Dent said she reported the problem to Diebold in November 2007 when some of her AccuVote machines behaved that way. "We were taken by surprise by it," Dent said.

A few counties today report problems with their AccuVote systems.

In Sarasota, Dent said, six optical scan machines had to be replaced. In one precinct, workers apparently forgot to remove a security bar, blocking ballots from ping into the ballot box.

In Volusia, ballots cast during two weeks of early voting will have to be rescanned because the equipment total came up four votes short.