ES&S Faces $10 Million Fine in California

The Omaha World-Herald's corporate sibling, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), continues to gain negative publicity - even if it never makes it into the Nebraska press (for quite obvious reasons).

After last week's damning report by Dan Rather on the conditions under which their machines are manufactured and the defects in their finished product, now comes word of a very serious failure to properly certify ES&S machines that could end up costing the company millions of dollars.  The Inquirer reports:

The California Secretary of State's office announced today that it is investigating ES&S for allegedly selling uncertified voting machines in violation of state elections laws. ES&S's Automark 100 voting machines have been certified in California since August 2005. However, ES&S is accused of selling its later model Automark 200 machines before they had been tested by the Federal government in August 2006. The Automark 200 machine still has not been submitted to the State for its examination and certification, according to a Secretary of State spokesperson....  

According to California law, ES&S could be fined $10,000 per uncertified machine, or $10 million dollars for 1,000 machines. In addition, ES&S could be required to make full refunds to counties that bought the uncertified machines, which reportedly would cost another $5 million dollars. ES&S could also be barred from doing business anywhere in the State of California for one to three years, which could mean headaches and unanticipated voting machine replacement costs for the 14 counties that currently have ES&S voting machines. It's not known how many such uncertified voting machines ES&S might have sold in other states.

I've called for the World-Herald to divest from ES&S several times out of principle. But, with these sorts of liabilities and this level of incompetence, it might be time to consider divesting to protect their own economic interests.

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Dan Rather Reveals Troubling Practices By Nebraska Vote-Counters ES&S

Having moved online to pursue the kind of investigative reporting that no longer has a home on TV news, longtime CBS anchorman Dan Rather has just struck a devastating blow to Election Systems & Software (ES&S), an Omaha-based company specializing in vote counting technology and overseeing elections. Last fall, I challenged the Omaha World-Herald's biased coverage of ES&S' failures in the 2006 elections, while taking issue with the World-Herald's ownership of a significant stake in ES&S. But, nothing then reported was so damning as Rather's new report, The Trouble with Touch Screens, which should be viewed by absolutely anyone concerned with the integrity of our elections and our democracy. Rather's hour-long report spends the first 30 minutes focusing almost exclusively on the shoddy manufacturing of ES&S' Touch Screen voting machines, which became all the rage after federal tax dollars were sent to the states through the Help America Vote Act to purchase tens of millions of dollars worth of such machines in response to the supposed failures of more traditional practices in the 2000 Florida presidential election. Rather makes a convincing case that the rush to embrace these new technologies might actually have created more problems than it solved, using the 2006 Congressional race in Florida's 13th District where ES&S machines showed very high rates of failure to set the tone for the entire report. Of ES&S' manufacturing, Rather uncovers terrible work conditions and almost no quality control with overseas workers in the Philippines paid as little as $2.15 a day. There are also suggestions that ES&S is tied in with a corrupt Filipino family and that they knowingly used touch screens with obvious material defects. In fact, a plant manager estimates that as many as 16,000 defective machines were delivered in the United States. Perhaps most disturbing for our purposes in Nebraska - where the Omaha World-Herald is so dominant a force in the local media - is the documented evidence of ES&S being so much more concerned with avoiding negative publicity than correcting problems with their software and their machines. The second half-hour of Rather's report is just as thought-provoking and scary, looking back at the circumstances of the 2000 election to advance a plausible theory of intentional sabotage by the vote machine industry to force adoption of new and more expensive technology. Again, I strongly urge readers to watch Rather's full report. It is sad that the Omaha World-Herald does not offer this sort of investigative reporting in its own pages. What's even sadder is that they continue to own so questionable a stake in ES&S, leaving open the possibility that their journalistic complacency is actually corporate-dictated journalistic corruption.

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