Maker admits vote-machine flaws

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A major voting-machine maker has cautioned its customers in 34 states, including Washington, 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 a handful of 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 previously had said complications with anti-virus software caused the problem, but the company said in a product advisory Tuesday that the problem is with the machines themselves.

The error occurs when multiple memory cards are being uploaded at the same time, and it is more likely to occur in jurisdictions that use touch-screen voting systems, Premier spokesman Chris Riggall said.

Premier, a unit of Diebold, supplies touch-screen voting systems as well as scanners for paper ballots. The problem is more likely to occur in touch-screen systems because they use more memory cards, one for every touch-screen.

King County and the Washington state Secretary of State's Office were among those informed by Premier this week that votes could be lost under certain circumstances. Touch-screen machines were available for Tuesday's primary at all of King County's 393 polling places for disabled voters and for other voters who preferred electronic voting to the county's paper optical-scan ballots.

"We have never experienced anything like what is reported out of Ohio," King County Elections spokeswoman Bobbie Egan said Thursday. In addition to other audits conducted after each election, King County compares the votes from 3 percent of all touch-screen machines with a paper record from each machine. "They've been 100 percent accurate in every election," Egan said.

King County, which has used the electronic machines since 2006, is the only county in Washington that uses Premier touch-screen machines at polling places, according to the Secretary of State's Office.

Premier said that the problem can be corrected as long as officials monitor whether the memory cards are being uploaded, and if they are not, reload them until they are.

In Ohio, the dropped votes were discovered within several hours by election officials who noticed the memory cards weren't being read properly. Workers re-fed the cards into the server until they worked, and the votes were added to the overall vote totals.

After Premier blamed the problem solely on anti-virus software, officials in Ohio's Butler County kept testing and said there was a problem with the machines. That was later verified by Premier's testing.

Ohio will continue to use the Premier machines in the Nov. 4 election. Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said identifying the cause will let the state prepare election officials to watch for the problem and correct it should it resurface.

Seattle Times reporter Keith Ervin contributed to this report.