Florida County at Center of Election Storm Dumps ES&S in Favor of Diebold

Sarasota County in Florida, where touch-screen voting machines made by Election Systems & Software are at the core of a hotly contested congressional race, says it no longer trusts ES&S and is switching to machines made by Diebold Election Systems. The ES&S machines have been the focus of controversy since last November when more than […]

Diebold
Sarasota County in Florida, where touch-screen voting machines made by Election Systems & Software are at the core of a hotly contested congressional race, says it no longer trusts ES&S and is switching to machines made by Diebold Election Systems.

The ES&S machines have been the focus of controversy since last November when more than 18,000 ballots cast in the general election showed no votes cast in the House of Representatives 13th Congressional District race. The winning candidate, Republican Vern Buchanan, won the election over Democrat Christine Jennings by fewer than 400 votes.

Hundreds of voters during the election complained that the machines were slow to respond to their touch or failed to register their selection in the CD-13 race. ES&S has maintained that there was nothing wrong with its machines, although a memo the company sent to Florida election officials months before the November election, and which surfaced in March, acknowledged that some of its machines had a problem with responding to voter touch. The election is being investigated by a congressional panel and the Government Accountability Office.

Sarasota was planning to replace its touch-screen machines with ES&S optical-scan machines -- per a new ban in the county on paperless touch-screen machines -- but decided Wednesday to cut ES&S loose and go with Diebold optical-scan machines instead. Optical-scan machines use a paper ballot that voters mark before scanning it into a machine.

"I've lost faith in ES&E entirely," Sarasota County Commissioner Jon Thaxton said before the vote.

BTW, I've put together a spreadsheet showing all of the problems that were reported with voting machines in Sarasota during the November election (taken from incident reports filed by pollworkers and technicians that day) -- you'll see some clear and interesting patterns in the reports.