More Than 1 in 4 Votes Recorded Incorrectly on Diebold System in Cuyahoga County, According to 2006 Election Audit
- Some Ballots Counted Twice, Others Not At All, Database Found Corrupted, Old, Not Recommended for Use by Microsoft
- Raw Election Data Held as 'Diebold Trade Secret' by Registrar Michael Vu Who Was Forced to Resign...Though He's Now
Been Hired by San Diego!
There is new information on the Cuyahoga County, Ohio, November 2006 election that shows that voting results on more
than 1 in 4 voting systems failed to match up with the results on the central tabulator. The election was held under the
administration of Michael Vu, the county's now-resigned Election Director who has, incredibly enough, been immediately hired up by the People's Republic of San Diego County and their former Registrar Mikel Haas (along with Vu, one of America's
worst, so he was promoted by the county, naturally!) as the new Assistant Registrar of Voters...
CLEVELAND — Computer vote-memory card totals failed to match electronic voting machine ballot tallies in more than one
quarter of the samples checked from the November election in the state’s most populous county, an independent audit
showed Thursday.
In the 37 sample precincts where results didn’t match, there may have been corrupted memory cards, missing or torn
reports, faulty printers or other problems, according to the independent audit commissioned by the Cuyahoga County
elections board.
...
The audit committee found a match among 95 precincts out of 132 precincts in which three races were checked for
discrepancies between vote-memory cards and paper records of ballots cast on electronic machines.
Amazing enough, but it gets much, much worse....
From Kim Zetter's Wired report on the same audit of the same disastrous mess, revealing that the Diebold system used to tally election results is
built on an old, out of date database engine that even Microsoft recommends against using!...
The database is built from Microsoft's Jet database engine. The engine, according to Microsoft, is vulnerable to corruption when a lot of concurrent activity is happening with the database, such as what occurs on
an election night when results are uploaded and various servers are interacting with the database simultaneously. This
is why Microsoft advises against using the Jet engine in a complex environment:
Because multiple client processes are reading and writing to the same database and because Jet does not use a
transaction log (as do the more advanced database systems, such as SQL Server), it is not possible to reliably prevent
any and all database corruption.
Wired also has a copy of the complete audit report [PDF].
The report also reveals that the new Diebold system has made things worse, not better, than even Cuyahoga's old punch card system! For example, on the Diebold op-scan system they use for absentee ballots (they use Diebold touch-screen DREs
for Election Day), "some optical scan ballots were scanned twice while others weren't scanned at all," according to
Zetter, who adds...
The report notes that with punch card machines election officials used to be able to determine definitively if all
ballots had been counted in the results. With the adoption of this new generation of voting equipment, however, the
report says "we have reduced rather than increased the accuracy and reliability of our elections results."
And of particular note to San Diegans --- who are also forced to use Diebold's horrible, unreliable, inaccurate voting
systems (touch-screen DREs on Election Day, op-scan for absentees) --- where attempts by citizens to view election data
have been continuously thwarted by Haas at every turn, comes this further clue as to why Vu will be perfect in his new job!
According to the report, Election Director Michael Vu initially denied the audit team access to the raw vote data to
examine because he said Diebold had asserted trade secrets protection over the data. By vote data, they're referring to
the vote totals and election reports, not the machine source code. It's unclear why he believed the company had a right
to assert such claims over such essential public records data.
Whadaya mean "unclear"? It's perfect! With a record like that, he'll no doubt be promoted from Assistant Registrar to
Registrar any day now in San Diego where, rumor has it, the Board of Supervisors are actually considering changing the
town's name to San Diebold...though we've yet to be able to confirm that particular report.
ENDS