brennan center for justice

iii.failures of the current system: case studiesPress reports from the last several years contain hundreds of reported cases of voting machinemalfunctions. A subset of these cases is summarized in Appendix B of this report (available in the onlineversion of this report). News items about voting system troubles tend not to include many details; thismakes it hard to identify from these reports the precise cause of a particular malfunction. Whatever thecauses of a particular problem, it is fair to assume that their occurrence in one jurisdiction will ofteneventually be repeated in another unless election officials throughout the country are made aware ofboth the causes of the problem and how to avoid them.Of the hundreds of reports of voting system malfunctions and vulnerabilities, we collected and closelystudied fourteen. They are summarized below. Most of the election officials we interviewed in connectionwith these summaries claimed to have had noprior warning of the problems we discuss. Bycontrast, in most cases, the vendors were (or“one of the more frustrating aspects should have been) aware of the problems – oftenbecause the same problem had been reported toof encountering [voting machine]them earlier by another election official.problems . . . is that the vendors1. Butler County, Ohio, March 2008themselves often know about the problemsIn March 2008, as they reconciled vote totalsand never disclose any details whatsoever from the State primary in their office’s DataDepartment, Ohio officials noticed that severalprior to the moment of crisis.”votes were dropped from memory cards evenjane platten, cuyahoga county board of though their final report stated that voteson these memory cards were counted. 35 Aelectionssubsequent investigation by Ohio electionofficials determined that at least 1,000 voteswere undercounted in nine of Ohio’s forty-fourcounties using Premier touch screen or opticalscan voting systems. 36 In an editorial several months later, the New York Times noted that Premier(known as Diebold Election Systems prior to rebranding in 2007) had subsequently notified more thanthirty states using its systems “to be on the lookout for missing votes.” 37Less widely reported was the fact that this same problem was apparently discovered in DuPage County,Illinois in 2004. In a county election summary (obtained by the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project and therelevant portions of which are annexed to this report as Appendix C), a technician who serviced themachines noted what appears to be the very same problem:GEMS Upload Failure on York 58 – This memory card had a failed upload transmissionon election night that was not detected until the next day when reports were on theprecinct, and zero results were found for each race within the precinct. The status ofthe memory card upload within the GEMS was “successful” but the upload recordshowed the ballot count to be zero. It is rather discomforting [sic] that this failedtransmission was not detected on election night.10 | Brennan Center for Justice