California Sues E-Voting Vendor ES&S

Gustoman writes with news that the California Secretary of State has sued ES&S, a vendor of e-voting machines, for selling machines that were modifications of the model that has been certified. Apparently ES&S relocated two circuit boards, rerouted several internal cables, and changed some mounting bracket supports in their AutoMark A100 devices, named the modified version AutoMark A200, and sold 972 of them to five California counties. The changes sound somewhat trivial, but the certification contract specified that no "substitution or modification of the voting systems shall be made with respect to any component of the voting systems... until the secretary of state has been notified in writing and has determined that the proposed change or modification does not impair the accuracy and efficiency of the voting systems sufficient to require a reexamination and approval." The state is seeking a penalty of $10,000 per machine sold, plus the cost of the machines to the counties — almost $15 million in all.

Comments

Re:Further proof...

[KDR_11k]

They had a contract. The supplier failed to follow it. Breach of contract is handled like this, I doubt the contract had anything about "just return it and go elsewhere" in it (also I'm not sure govt spending can be redirected as easily as that, remember that there's the whole lowest bidder thing to go through). Even if, that would cause additional costs for the govt because of the additional work to get another machine made. If a store sells you a product that's not what you told them you want that's fraud, if a supplier sells you something that's not what the contract specified that's breach of contract.

Look at their track record.

[Qem]

http://www.news4jax.com/politics/3890292/detail.html "The software is not geared to count more than 32,000 votes in a precinct. So what happens when it gets to 32,000 is the software starts counting backward," said Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman. The article says that they'd known about the problem for two years and failed to fix it. http://abcnews.go.com/US/comments?type=story&id=2646802 Randy Wooten figured he'd get at least one vote in his bid for mayor of this town of 80 people even if it was just his own. He didn't. Now he has to decide whether to file a formal protest. http://backslash.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/01/191235 The Open Voting Foundation's disclosure that only one switch need be flipped to allow the machine to boot from an unverified external flash drive instead of the built-in, verified EEPROM There has been tons of mishaps with those machines reported on slashdot alone... I certainly don't blame them for throwing the book at them and fining them for all their worth. It certainly sends across the message that the voting system is not to be fucked with and hopefully it can help prevent situations like the above.