Premier, Browning weigh in on Hillsborough elections

TAMPA -- With the outcomes of several high-profile races hanging in the balance, Hillsborough County elections officials on Wednesday will begin rescanning about 80,000 ballots cast during early voting.

The rescanning will be done by hand because about 60 percent of the ballot scanners used for early voting failed to upload their data to the office's server for tabulation. Elections officials said they will try to scan the ballots as quickly as possible. More than 146,000 Hillsborough voters participated in early voting.

Premier Election Solutions, the company that provides Hillsborough County with its optical scan voting system, said delays in tallying the county's votes Tuesday were caused by premature termination of data uploads from remote locations. Information was sent from those locations by modem to the central vote counting site at the Supervisor of Elections office.

The large amount of data on memory cards from machines used during early voting caused the same problem, according to a statement issued by the company today.

Although more than 20 counties in the state use Premier voting systems, Secretary of State Kurt Browning said to his knowledge Hillsborough is the only county encountering difficulties. "We've certified those systems," Browning said. "There are just some things that at this point, I guess, are frustrating and unexplainable."

He said the state needs to get to the point where voting systems "are performing the way that these counties have contracted them to work." Browning said one of his top 2009 legislative priorities is to make sure that three main voting equipment vendors are producing "first-rate products."

Janet Zink, Times Staff Writer

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Comments

[Concerned]

I guess that neither Browning or Johnson pay attention to Election Integrity issues that are not in Florida.

The Ohio Secretary of State issued a procedure directive to Ohio election officials to deal with a Premier tabulation problem that sounds very similar to what is being reported here in Hillsborough County. OH SoS Brunner is also suing Premier for selling to OH election machines that are unfit for purpose. Premier knew about the problem, but did not admit it until forced to.

Doing a web search like:
+Ohio +Brunner +Premier Diebold
should turn up the information.

Another search:
+Ohio +EVEREST
will allow you to get the results of the EVEREST study. There are two executive summaries that should be required reading for anyone that cares about democracy.

The CA SoS released the results of the Top-to-Bottom Review of Election Machines late last year. That report caused the immediate decertification of all voting machines in CA. Most were conditionally recertified for this year's elections.

According to both of these studies absolutely none of the voting machines being used to count our votes in US elections can be trusted to count correctly. The studies were done by some of the top computer scientist and computer security experts in the country from universities such as UCSD, Princeton, Rice, Penn State, U.Penn, and others. Why this information is not more widely known is beyond me. It's certainly well known to computer security folks such as myself.

There's nothing like using nuclear weapons to kill flies.
Why can't we just hand count paper ballots like the rest of the world?

This is clearly a scam and Buddy is delaying the vote tabulation so he claim victory.

[Susan S]

Is it true that two employees of Premiere handled absentee ballots today? Were they supposed to be in the counting room? Does that violate the law?

Buddy is stealing this election. I hope the St. Pete Times will stay on top of this story.

[Seriously?]

C'mon Buddy!

This isn't fitting in an extra party of 8 for Sunday breakfast. This is a party of 80,000 and we've waited long enough for our Tuesday votes.

We're tired, hungry and don't want the spit platter from a disgruntled cook.

[mikes]

Article referrenced modem failure of reporting counts to central server. That is the modulator-demodulator between analog phone line and the digital servers. So there is no back up of this comuunications link i.e. data cannot be transfered another way and the whole total of input documents must be reentered??!! Surely there is another way around this glitch in the modem/s. Good grief!!!!