The VOTING IS RIGGED....
New voting equipment didn't pass state muster
Marion County clerk says Omaha company tried to cover up error by reinstalling old software.
The Marion County Election Board will hold an emergency meeting Thursday to discuss whether to take any action. David Woo (above) is service center supervisor for the board. -- Matt Detrich / The Star
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How votes are digitally tallied
• 1. The voter fills in a ballot and feeds it through the vote counter.
• 2. After polls close, vote tally memory cards are driven to one of seven sites in the county.
• 3. Personal computers read the card data and transmit information to a central computer at the Marion County election center, 68 N. Gale St. The software that does this work, known as data acquisition manager, was not certified by the state.
• 4. The central computer tallies all the votes and reports the results.
Source: Star staff reporting
By John Fritze
john.fritze@indystar.com
April 21, 2004
Marion County's optical-scan voting system was not ready for its debut last fall because it used unapproved software the manufacturer later tried to replace in a cover-up, Marion County Clerk Doris Anne Sadler said Tuesday.
The revelation, which came two weeks before the May 4 primaries, raised questions about the Omaha-based company, Election Systems & Software, that provides voting equipment to 41 counties and more than half of Indiana's registered voters.
"It's a trust issue on something that's very important to the public," said Sadler, a Republican, who was not clerk when the machines were purchased. "We're not buying tomato sauce here. We're conducting an election."
Sadler called for an emergency meeting of the Marion County Election Board on Thursday to decide whether the officials should take some action against the company. She said the primary and general elections would proceed as planned with the correct equipment.
The problem with last fall's election was with software that collects votes and moves them from one computer to another. The company used a version of the software that had not received state certification.
That certification is granted by the State Election Commission after tests are conducted by independent companies to ensure the equipment meets state and federal guidelines. Sadler said she learned of the problem Friday, three weeks after ES&S switched the software back to an earlier, certified version.
The switch, she said, was done under the guise of routine maintenance.
In two statements issued Tuesday, ES&S acknowledged it made an error but said the uncertified software did not affect the system's accuracy.
"We believe our customers would agree that our equipment is reliable, accurate and secure," the statement read. "We have conducted many successful elections in Indiana and across the country."
Three City-County Council races were decided by fewer than 100 votes in the Nov. 4 election. On Tuesday, Marion County Democratic Party Chairman Ed Treacy called for recounts in at least a half-dozen close races from last year.
"We talked about waking up in Florida. Now I think we've woken up in Taiwan," Treacy said, referring to the controversy that surrounded the 2000 presidential election. "This is just completely unacceptable."
Sadler said she did not think the uncertified software affected last year's election results. In that election, which decided control of the City-County Council and the Indianapolis mayor's office, 150,440 residents voted.
Sadler said she is less concerned about the possibility of skewed vote tallies than she is about a company that repeatedly has sold illegal equipment and, in this case, concealed it.
Thursday's election board meeting will address possible responses, which include terminating the contract with the company or asking it to pay back a portion of the system's cost.
County officials, who had expected to be reimbursed by the federal government, are still trying to determine how they will pay about $8 million due on the machines this year.
Sadler said the optical-scan system will be ready for the May 4 primary. By coincidence, she said, the system showed no sign of trouble in a test earlier this week.
Tuesday's news comes one month after ES&S was chastised by the four-member, bipartisan Election Commission for selling similarly uncertified voting equipment in four other counties: Johnson, Vanderburgh, Wayne and Henry.
The company was required to post a $10 million bond to ensure this year's elections go smoothly in those four counties.
In Marion County's case, Sadler said when the company realized it had made the error, it told its local representative, Wendy Orange, not to disclose it. Orange, reached Tuesday afternoon, declined to comment.
ES&S executives refused to answer questions directly but, in a statement, said: "ES&S acknowledges that we made an error in how we communicated to our customers. . . . We would not ask anyone to knowingly lie to any election administrators, including those in Marion County."
The problems have not been confined to Indiana.
Similar equipment, for example, malfunctioned during its first use in Hawaii's 1998 general election, a problem caused by chunks of food and other foreign substances that stuck to ballots.
Marion County purchased the equipment two years ago, and the system was approved by the City-County Council, controlled by Republicans at the time.
The Indiana General Assembly passed a law last year allowing the state to ban companies that sell uncertified equipment from doing business here for up to five years. It's unclear whether that law, which took effect in March, will apply in this case.
State certification is required for all voting equipment -- including software -- and lasts for five years.
The Republican and Democratic co-directors of the Indiana Election Division said the company never applied for certification of the software in question.
That software, known as the data acquisition manager, reads computer storage cards that are removed from the county's 937 optical-scan machines after polls close. Once it collects data from each card, it sends vote tallies to a central computer.
"This is pretty serious," said Kristi Robertson, Democratic co-director of the division.
"This should never have happened after what we just went through with them."
Call Star reporter John Fritze at (317) 444-2752. |
