News-Record.com

A year or two back, there was a big hubbub over how American Idol’s voting system couldn’t handle the call volume and some contestants got fewer votes than they may have expected.

While the singing contest seems to have for the most part gotten itself together, stories like this one don’t inspire confidence in how we choose our honorables:

A laboratory that has tested most of the nation’s electronic voting systems has been temporarily barred from approving new machines after federal officials found that it was not following its quality-control procedures and could not document that it was conducting all the required tests.

The company, Ciber Inc. of Greenwood Village, Colo., has also come under fire from analysts hired by New York State over its plans to test new voting machines for the state. New York could eventually spend $200 million to replace its aging lever devices.

(Snip)

“What’s scary is that we’ve been using systems in elections that Ciber had certified, and this calls into question those systems that they tested,” said Aviel D. Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins.

Oh, and there was this report that made it into my e-mail box today:

A report prepared by civic watchdog groups VoteTrustUSA, VotersUnite.org, and Voter Action found the 2006 mid-term elections were marred by persistent and widespread voting machine malfunctions ... In all, 1022 accounts of machine related problems from more than 300 counties in 36 states were examined and categorized.

All of which should keep these folks in business for a while longer.