A Deeper Look at ESI’s Report of the Discrepancy-Ridden Vote Counts In Diebold Touchscreen Voting Machines

In August 2006, Election Science Institute (ESI) released a report entitled, “DRE Analysis of May 2006 Primary; Cuyahoga County, Ohio”. Election Science Institute is a non-partisan, non-profit election science organization, which was commissioned by Cuyahoga County to review how the county’s new election system performed in the early stages of use.

What ESI found was internally inconsistent, unreliable vote totals on every level.

Several reviewers of the ESI report, including Don Seligson, Michael Alvarez, and Dan Tokaji, have focused almost exclusively on the problems with the VVPAT, to the extent that the titles of their articles suggest the report is only about the VVPAT failures.

We believe these reviewers are missing the point of the data that surfaced during ESI’s investigation. Certainly, Diebold’s implementation of the VVPAT was deplorable. But worse than that, the investigation discovered that all the machine vote counts in the May 2006 primary were internally inconsistent and therefore thoroughly unreliable.

Significant discrepancies were found in every comparison of data that should have matched.

It is impossible to know the true totals.

The Executive Summary of the ESI threat analysis, could not be more clear:

“Any issue that leads to unreliable consolidation of data is serious because thousands of votes could be lost or shifted by accident in the electronic count.”

“Unless the mechanical and/or training issues found in the ESI report are resolved, it is quite likely that reliance on the VVPAT in recounts will lead to the wrong result in some future election.”

However, the data presented in the ESI report clearly demonstrate the real threat — not problems caused by adding inferior VVPAT technology to DREs, but the severe internal inconsistencies in the DREs’ electronic vote-total reports. These inconsistencies cast serious doubt on all election outcomes reported by the machines — that is, whichever of the differing reports is deemed official.

The real threat is much higher than the possibility of compromised recounts. The clear and present danger is the thwarting of the public will in the initial, official outcomes of elections entrusted to these machines.

Download VotersUnite's Full Response To The ESI Report