Disclosure of an election computer glitch that could drop ballot totals for entire precincts is stirring new worries that an unofficial laboratory testing system failed for years to detect an array of flaws in $1.5 billion worth of voting equipment sold nationwide since 2003.
Texas-based Premier Elections Solutions last week alerted at least 1,750 jurisdictions across the country that special precautions are needed to address the problem in tabulation software affecting all 19 of its models dating back a decade.
Voting experts reacted skeptically to the company's assertion that election workers' routine crosschecks of ballot totals would have spotted any instances where its servers failed to register some precinct vote totals when receiving data from multiple memory cards.
Like nearly all of the nation's modern voting equipment, Premier's products were declared "qualified" under a voluntary testing process overseen from the mid 1990s until 2005 by the National Association of State Election Directors.
Computer scientists, some state officials and election watchdog groups allege that the NASED-sponsored testing system was a recipe for disaster, shrouded in secrecy, and allowing equipment makers to help design the tests.
The federal Election Assistance Administration, created in 2002, took over the testing responsibility in 2005, but has yet to certify a single voting machine.
As a result, charged Susan Greenhalgh, a spokeswoman for watchdog group Voter Action, the systems on which Americans will decide the race between Barack Obama and John McCain in November are "scandalously flawed"' and "the integrity of this election is in question."
David Beirne, executive director of the Election Technology Council, which represents the leading makers of voting machines, said there's no reason for concern. Without mentioning NASED, he said that members' products "have all been certified" as meeting 2002 voluntary federal standards.
NASED officials took on the testing in the mid 1990s, after the Federal Election Commission adopted voluntary federal standards for voting machines but Congress failed to create a testing agency. The industry was frustrated, too, by being governed by a hodge-podge of state standards.
"We had two choices: To try to do something or to do nothing," said Thomas Wilkey, who headed NASED's volunteer Voting Systems Committee for several years while executive director of New York's elections board. "We had a set of standards. It was a crime to let them sit on a shelf."
NASED watched over the issuance of "qualified" reports from Independent Testing Laboratories, but with little control over the testing. The vendors secretly negotiated payments with the labs, helped design the tests, got to see the results first and only shared the codes driving their software with three NASED technical experts who signed non-disclosure agreements.
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