The problem was identified after complaints from Ohio elections officials following the March primary there, but the logic error that is the root of the problem has been part of the software for 10 years, said Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold.

The flawed software is on both touch screen and optical scan voting machines made by Premier and the problem with vote counts is most likely to affect larger jurisdictions that feed many memory cards to a central counting database rapidly.

In their rush to avoid a repeat of the controversy that plagued the 2000 presidential election, and to meet the requirements of Congress's hastily mandated 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), states and counties flocked to electronic voting systems they hoped would eliminate hanging chads and other flaws inherent in paper-based systems.

DAYTON — Four area county boards of elections are parties to a breach-of-contract lawsuit counterclaim filed by the Ohio Secretary of State on Wednesday, Aug. 6, against the maker of touch-screen electronic voting machines.
Montgomery, Greene, Miami and Butler counties are among 11 counties that Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said experienced voting machine equipment malfunctions, including failure to properly tabulate votes.

The move comes fewer than 90 days before Ohio voters go to the polls in an election that could decide the presidential race, but Brunner says safeguards will be in place by then in the affected counties to mitigate any risks.
"We will make the equipment work, but this is not something that Ohio should be satisfied with for the long term," Brunner said. "Our goal is to have Ohio taxpayers compensated for this equipment that doesn't function properly."

Voting-machine companies displayed their latest technology on Friday for Ohio's largest voting jurisdiction. Now the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections has less than three weeks to make a choice.
Three firms are competing to sell or lease what could be millions of dollars in equipment to the state's biggest county. Elections Director Jane Platten wants the board to pick a vendor by June 10 to avoid a rushed transition to the November presidential election.

...when two lengthy reports examining Cuyahoga County's election procedures uncovered multiple serious problems (the county lost 812 voter-access cards that allow a voter to cast a ballot on machines; it also lost 313 keys to the memory-card compartments where votes are stored on machines and hired taxi drivers to drive to election precincts and pick up the memory cards that contained the votes).

Though Ohio officials stayed on their toes in handling bomb threats, ice storms and power failures, they were tripped up in the end by failing to anticipate three developments: a huge turnout, a surge in Republicans voting in the Democratic primary, and a large number of voters who preferred the security of a paper ballot to the questionable technology of touch-screen machines.

But because the order arrived after the polls had already closed, election officials were only able to reopen 10 polling stations, according to the Ohio secretary of state, Jennifer Brunner. That resulted in five additional votes being cast, Ms. Brunner said.

Sandusky County Board of Elections office says they ran out of ballots at around 11:30 a.m. The ballots were mostly Democratic. They printed up new ballots, but due to equipment malfunctions, they fell behind in delivering the new ballots to the precincts.

As a result an estimated 300-400 Sandusky County residents chose to leave before voting. The board of elections petitioned a judge to extend voting hours.

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday the county can hold the March election with its new optical-scan voting system, despite objections from the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio.
Four weeks before the election, it was within Judge Kathleen O'Malley's power to order the county to revert back to touch-screen voting, which was scrapped in December.
Lawyers for the ACLU of Ohio had asked for an injunction to prevent using the optical-scan voting system because they argued the new system is unconstitutional.