Diebold can Shed Name, Not Past

The truth will set you free. Confession is good for the soul. It’s better to remain silent and be thought of as a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. These are just a few ways of saying “We Screwed Up!”

The “we” I speak of is Premier Election Solutions or better known as Diebold. Seems they have come out and admitted to software glitches in its GEMS voting system. You know the ones we use to elect Presidents.

What’s the problem?

Seems the GEMS system drops vote counts while being transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point according to Premier Election Solutions. To make matters worse, the vote count problem is most likely to affect larger jurisdictions that rapidly feed memory cards into a central counting database.

Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Premier Election Solutions said this issue should have been recognized by election officials over the years…oh, that’s right, I didn’t tell you that part, the flawed system has been in use for the last 10 years.

In fact, it wasn’t long ago that Premier blamed the error on anti-virus software installed by the users; in this case the Ohio elections officials who started poking around after they realized large numbers of votes had been lost. Mr. Dave Byrd, President of Premier had this to say when he found out about the programming error; “We are indeed distressed that our previous analysis of this issue was in error.” That’s great Dave, how do you still have a job to be able to give a quote?

How widespread is the problem?

Well let’s see. The GEMS system is currently in use in 34 states, about 1,750 jurisdictions in all. And as previously mentioned, been in use for the last 10 years. I wonder why election officials from the jurisdictions that utilize these voting systems haven’t come out with any of their results. Wait, I know why.

Because there isn’t a fix for this November’s election!

That’s right boys and girls, according to Rigall; “Unlike other software, the problem acknowledged by Premier cannot be fixed by sending out a coding fix to its customers because of federal rules for certifying election systems.” “Changes to systems must go through the Election Assistance Commission and take two years on average for certification and approval — and that is apart from whatever approvals and reviews would be needed by each elections board throughout the country.” Here’s a question, isn’t part of the certification process that the effers work?

To make your heart sink a bit further into your gut, Riggall says “the mistake is not immediately apparent and would have to be caught when elections officials went to match how many memory cards they fed into a central database against how many show as being read by that database. Each card carries a unique marker.” So we have mechanical error followed up by the potential for human error. And I make fun of people that don’t vote!

So, on that chilly November night when CNN declares a winner 20 minutes after the polls have closed, you can rest assured that those results have been tallied by a system so advanced that the company that created it didn’t even know it was broken for 10 years. Maybe the Communists are on to something?