From the AP:
A major voting machine maker has cautioned its customers in 34 states to look out for a programming error that may cause votes to be dropped.
At least 1,000 total votes were dropped in nine Ohio counties over the course of a handful elections back to 2006, including the March presidential primary, though the error was in all cases discovered and corrected within several hours. Premier Election Solutions Inc. previously had said complications with antivirus software caused the problem, but on Tuesday the company said in a product advisory that the problem is with the machines themselves.
Not good news. Not good at all. By the way, Premier Election Solutions Inc. is the company formerly known as Diebold. Yes, that Diebold. Although I believe George Bush won Ohio in 2004, that still makes it more disturbing.
While paper ballots will allow for checking the results, we still don't have them everywhere.
Republican-appointed Southern accent-having Florida Secretary of State fortunately lets us know that at least, that state is all paper ballots.
Anyway, although we thankfully have a Democratic Secretary of State in Ohio (Jennifer Brunner), she can only do a limited amount with defective machines
"We are indeed distressed that our previous analysis of this issue was in error," Premier President Dave Byrd wrote Tuesday in a letter that was hand-delivered to Brunner. Premier and Brunner are in an ongoing court battle over the voting machines and whether Premier violated its contract with the state and warranties. Half of the Ohio's 88 counties use the GEMS system. Brunner has been a vocal critic of electronic voting machines,
And of course, it's not just Ohio. 1,750 localities use this voting system in 34 states.
I'm not going to search and identify all the localities using them, but I have found the 34 states:
They are:
Maryland, Ohio (fortunately Cuyahoga County, which contains Cleveland and a very large number of Democrats, no longer uses these machines), Virginia (see the links above),
Alaska: Statewide
Arizona: Pima County and others
California: Butte, Humboldt, Trinity, Plumas and others
Colorado: Larimer
Connecticut: Somewhere
Florida: Alachua, Wakulla
Georgia: Fayette,
Illinois: Du Page
Indiana: Ripley
Iowa: Carroll, Scott
Kansas: Johnson, Lyon
Michigan: Delta
Minnesota: Anoka
Mississippi: Warren (ironically, Mississippi uses hand-written paper to record its official election results; I'm not kidding)
Missouri: City of St. Louis, Clay
New York: Rockland
North Carolina: Harnett
Pennsylvania: Carbon, Union
Tennessee: Hamilton
Texas: El Paso
Utah: Wasatch
Vermont: Burlington
Washington: See here for statewide info by county
Wisconsin: Chippewa,
Wyoming: Here
Note: I wasn't going to post this, but someone just posted a request for a diary, so here goes ...