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Diebold decision leaves one company to provide compliant voting machines
December 24,2005
BY Sue Book    New Bern Sun Journal 

Craven County Board of Elections' choice for new voting equipment is now the only game in town for North Carolina's 100 counties.

Election Systems and Software, regionally based in New Bern, is the only voting equipment manufacturer left that is certified to sell its machines in the state. Diebold Election Systems' decided earlier this week not to sell in the state.

"Now we're charged with the task of providing election systems in North Carolina," said Owen Andrews of Printelect, ES&S's New Bern-based representative for North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia.

"We rolled out systems for South Carolina in a similar amount of time," said Andrews, noting that 64 counties already have ed equipment manufactured by the privately held company headquartered in Omaha, Neb. They include Carteret, Onslow, Duplin, Gaston, Forsyth and Durham counties.

The Craven County board voted Tuesday to buy both direct recording electronic and optical scan voting machines from ES&S to replace 208 ES&S voting machines that don't comply with new state requirements for a paper record of all votes cast.

Pamlico County has used ES&S equipment since 1997, but was investigating alternatives.

"We're the only company that has fully complied with the state's new law," Andrews said.

New software on an electronic voting machine used for one-stop voting in Carteret County's 2004 election was not activated and failed to record 4,438 votes. Those lost votes prompted a voter outcry that resulted in a complex law to prevent it from happening again.

"That couldn't have happened on our machines," Andrews said of the glitch causing the voting machine to stop at 3,000. "If this machine fills up with votes, you will get an error code and the ballot never shows up." But ES&S has redesigned its DRE voting machine to include a paper record of the touch-screen ballot cast.

The state put bid requests out allowing all election equipment manufacturers the opportunity to participate, but only five submitted bids and only one jumped through all the complex hoops to be certified.

Craven's cost for the new equipment is estimated at $450,000 with federal Help America Vote Act funds contributing about $375,000 of it.

Diebold, a publicly traded company, was late with its bid submission, but the North Carolina State Board of Elections still allowed it to stay in the running.

Then Diebold said it could not comply with the source code escrow requirement. That prompted a lawsuit by a voters advocate group.

The state requirement for a $7.5 million performance bond was an obstacle for some other companies, Andrews said.

Along with Printelect's New Bern and Fayetteville offices, which are ramping up operations and hiring new representatives to meet the current challenge, ES&S has an office in Cary.



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