Officials in Montgomery County in Ohio discovered this week that tabulation software used with touch-screen voting machines in the presidential election failed to count five votes in the city of Trotwood. The voting system in question is made by Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems).
Montgomery County officials discovered that although the five votes were recorded to a memory card inside the voting machine, the votes weren't counted by the tabulation software when the memory card was uploaded to the tabulation server. Premier's Global Election Management System (or GEMS) is the tabulation software that counts votes from memory cards.
The company's GEMS software is currently at the center of an investigation into dropped votes in a California county and was also the source of a previous problem found in Ohio in Montgomery and Butler counties during the May primary. Officials discovered then that the GEMS system dropped votes if officials tried to load too many memory cards at once. The problem turned out to be a sharing violation on the Premier election servers set up in eleven counties. No votes were lost during the primary as a result of this problem, since officials were aware the machine was rejecting votes when it occurred, but the state sued Premier in August over this and other issues.
Unlike the primary, officials had no indication in the November general election that the machine was dropping the five votes that were discovered missing this week.
The votes were not included in the official count that county officials certified to the state. Montgomery officials discovered the missing votes only through a special hand audit they were conducting on order from Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner.
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