Possibly faulty voting machines still used by Collin County

by Bill Baumbach of The Collin County Observer

It was back in 2003 that Collin County made the decision to purchase all electronic, touch screen voting machines from Diebold. They have been used in every election since then.

Many, including this author, have expressed concerns that the use of digital voting machines did not provide the essential safeguards needed to absolutely assure that an election result was correct and honest. Without an auditable paper trail, all election audits come down to trusting that the equipment is totaling the votes correctly.

Elections are run, not on trust, but on verification.

A few years ago, Diebold spun off its election machine division to Premier Election Systems. Now comes the stunning news that Premier is admitting that these machines' audit trail is incomplete and unable to record if votes were deleted.

Several states, but unfortunately, not Texas, have prohibited the use of these direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines, unless they provide a paper copy of the vote that the voter can verify as correct.

In the 2004 Presidential election, one Collin County Diebold DRE locked up. Attempts to retrieve the votes on it failed, despite Diebold's assurances that such a thing could never happen due to multiple memories and fail safes.

The votes on that machine were finally counted by Diebold's programmers in Vancouver, Canada - out of sight of any Collin County election official or poll watcher. I know, I was one of the poll watchers at the county's central counting station that year.