Diebold Admits Disenfranchising Voters, Faces Decertification

Diebold apologizes for device flaws

The nation's second-largest provider of voting systems concedes that its flagship products in California have significant security flaws and that it supplied hundreds of poorly designed electronic-voting devices that disenfranchised voters in the March presidential primary.

Diebold Election Services Inc. president Bob Urosevich admitted this and more, and apologized "for any embarrassment."

"We were caught. We apologize for that," Urosevich said of the mass failures of devices needed to call up digital ballots. Poll-workers in Alameda and San Diego counties hadn't been trained on ways around their failure, and San Diego County chose not to supply polls with backup paper ballots, crippling the largest rollout of e-voting in the nation on March 2. Unknown thousands of voters were turned away at the polls.

"We're sorry for the inconvenience of the voters," Urosevich said.

"Weren't they actually disenfranchised?" asked Tony Miller, chief counsel to the state's elections division.
After a moment, Urosevich agreed: "Yes, sir."

Seattle journalist and BlackBoxVoting.org leader Bev Harris took a microphone two feet in front of Urosevich and said, "What we have is a company that lies. Yes, I'll say it -- lies."

California elections regulators expect to make a recommendation today to Secretary of State Kevin Shelley on whether to disallow or "decertify" some or all of Diebold's voting machines -- or electronic voting altogether -- for the November elections.

State officials and other voting industry experts said they expected California's Voting Systems and Procedures Panel, at a minimum, to decertify Diebold's latest TSx touchscreen voting system, purchased by four counties for more than $40 million.

Such a move would send San Diego, Solano, San Joaquin and Kern counties scrambling for a new voting system, and it would mark a first: No other state has decertified a modern, electronic-voting machine since the race to embrace e-voting after Florida's chad-filled difficulties of 2000.

State elections officials hinted they were leaning toward some form of decertification in two reports that took a critical first look at the nation's largest rollout of electronic voting in a presidential primary and Diebold's actions beforehand.

In one report on the March 2 primary, elections analysts and consultants for Shelley's office found "numerous problems and concerns" that suggested that touchscreen voting "may not yet be stable, reliable and secure enough to use in the absence of an accessible, voter-verified, paper audit trail."

State elections officials were dismayed to find that Diebold had sold and installed thousands of its new TSx machines in the state without getting them tested, nationally qualified and even before applying for state certification.