Test Shows Palm Beach Voting Machines Not Accurate!

Tests run yesterday in Palm Beach County Florida show there is a real problem with their voting machines.  The optical scan machines, made by Sequoia, can't count the same ballots the same way two times in a row! They get a different count each time.  Washington DC, another customer of Sequoia, is also having trouble with their voting machines, high speed optical scanners.  Earlier this month, "DC's machines somehow managed to inflate the vote totals in some races by more than 100 percent, making up thousands of write-in votes and adding thousands of votes to the totals of candidates on the ballot." according to Government Computer News. Pierce County Washington found problems with their Sequoia precinct optical scanners and could not allow them to be used to count their Instant Runoff Voting ballots. San Francisco uses the same machines for IRV. What can be done to protect the voters in these districts, come November?

Palm Beach County's ballot-counting machines off by dozens in tests

Rejected under-votes and over-votes tallied; totals off by dozens By Brian Haas | South Florida Sun-Sentinel October 2, 2008

Palm Beach County's high-speed ballot counting machines couldn't count the same ballots the same way twice in tests performed Wednesday evening.

As part of a challenge to a disputed judicial race, elections officials tested two Sequoia 400-C counting machines to see how they handled ballots they previously rejected as either over- or under-votes.

Wednesday's tests were simple. Election workers took 262 ballots previously rejected by the machines as over- or under-votes in the judicial race and ran them through two machines. All of them should have been rejected again in the tests.

That didn't happen.

On the first two tests of 160 ballots, the machines accepted three ballots as good votes. On tests on 102 more ballots that should have been rejected, the machines first accepted 13 ballots as good votes and then 90 on a second run....more at the link

Sequoia officials did not attend the testing. It would be too embarrassing and they would be asked to explain everything. 

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