Voting Machine Mess-up Du Jour (Displayed 07/10/04 & 07/11/04)

Miami-Dade, Florida. July, 2004. ES&S Unity election management software More and more bugs surface in the ES&S software, but only in response to public records requests.*
	In a June 3 letter to ES&S, obtained by The Herald in a public records request, Miami-Dade County Supervisor of Elections Constance Kaplan demanded answers to three problems with the iVotronic equipment that she said could take "labor intensive and costly" actions to fix. She asked ES&S to resolve these issues "expeditiously:"
		The central database machines used to tabulate votes are incapable of holding all the audit data at once, requiring a ''labor intensive and costly'' solution that could complicate a recount in a close race. Audit data is used to back up the system.
		The optical scanners used to read absentee ballots have problems when information is merged from the three machines the county uses.
		And the county could potentially mix up votes if it were to try to use phone lines to transmit data from the polling places to the election center, which it doesn't plan to do.
The response from ES&S? Fix it yourself by changing your election procedures to work around the bugs.
	ES&S Senior Vice President Ken Carbullido responded to Kaplan on June 14, noting that each of the problems could be resolved if the county alters its procedures, reconfigures its software or, if it wants to transmit data from the polling places, redo the programming code in the machines or retrain its staff.

* Documents detail more voting machine flaws. The Miami Herald. July 9, 2004. By Mary Ellen Klas.

We believe in the security, the reliability and the accuracy
of the touch-screen systems that we have, the DREs.
~ Ken Carbullido, Senior VP ES&S