Broken memory card blamed in lost ballots  (OH)

Lynn Hulsey    Dayton Daily News    08 January 2009

DAYTON — The maker of Montgomery County's electronic voting machines is blaming a damaged memory card for the loss of five ballots on Election Day.

Board of Elections Director Steve Harsman said Premier Election Solutions' preliminary report, however, does not indicate how the card became damaged or, more importantly, why the company's software did not detect the problem or correct it.

The five missing ballots from a single precinct in Trotwood on Nov. 4 were discovered only because that precinct was one counted in a special audit of electronic voting machine results ordered statewide by Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner.

Once the problem was discovered during the audit, the votes were retrieved from the machine's backup system and added to final election results more than one month after the election. It was the first time the anomaly was found nationwide.

Premier plans to send employees to Montgomery County to further investigate the problem.

The glitch raises reliability questions about the Premier machines, which are already under a cloud after a 2007 state study found serious security failures. Brunner filed suit against Premier for breach of contract last year.

Harsman said the missing ballot problem in Montgomery County could become an issue in that lawsuit. The memory card and voting equipment would be evidence, so the board will retain physical control of those materials, he said. Harsman said he's contacted Brunner and Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to discuss how to proceed to make sure the evidence is preserved and not tampered with.

Montgomery County is the largest of 44 Ohio counties using the Premier machines, which earlier were scrapped by Cuyahoga County. Montgomery County paid $6.2 million for 2,500 machines in 2005. The machines made by Premier, then known as Diebold Election Systems, were among the few certified by former Secretary of State Ken Blackwell.

In 2006, local voting rights advocates discovered calibration problems with the machines here, and in the March 2008 primary, Montgomery and Butler counties found some votes did not properly upload to servers.

Montgomery County also has had problems with the paper records of ballots cast on the machines and with scanners that read paper ballots.