Diebold: your votes were a virus

Facing down a Ohio lawsuit against Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold) for selling the state voting machines that habitually lost votes, Diebold has responded with an intriguing defense: it was anti-virus software that ate the votes.

Brunner said that Premier's system dropped votes when memory cards were uploaded to shared servers. Election staff recovered the votes hours later, she said.

Election workers notified Premier of the problems and received a product advisory notice in late May. The notice explained that an antivirus program that operated on the server simultaneously had caused the problems. Premier instructed users to disable the antivirus software on vote tabulation servers when uploading votes from memory cards.

Further proof that anti-virus software is a neo-con conspiracy.

Electronic Voting Machines At Center Of Ohio Lawsuits [Information Week via Daring Fireball]

Image: xkcd

[#1 posted by Anonymous , August 19, 2008 3:49 PM]

Honestly, how difficult can it be to create vote-tallying software? I wrote a counting program in BASIC in 6th grade that covers 80% of the required functionality.

[#2 posted by AliasUndercover , August 20, 2008 9:49 AM]

Did they actually say that was the reason? Holy crap, what a load.