Diebold/Premier voting machine bug has been losing votes for ten years and no one noticed

Although proper cross-checking should have turned up the bug in voting machines in use as long as ten years in 34 different states -- it was only recently that 'vigilant' voting officials in Ohio became aware of a problem with the machines that has apparently been causing "lost" votes for as much as a decade.

The company had furiously denied there was a problem with the machines -- even going so far as to sue an Ohio county that stopped using the machines because of continuing irregularities. The state of Ohio countersued -- and found that other counties then found the same problem.

But the company, Premier (formerly known as Diebold) finally was forced to admit that the problem was inherent to their machines -- and had been in place and presumably causing lost votes -- for ten years.

The company offered the altogether unreassuring excuse that voting officials should have been cross-checking and if they had, they should have run the totals again. But no officials came forward to complain (as far as we know at this time -- litigation is pending and the company is dummying up) so -- presumably -- the mistakes went unrecognized for a decade because election officials across the country simply didn't bother to do basic cross checking.

The cynics among us may speculate that county election officials -- often wined and dined extravagantly by voting machine companies vying for lucrative voting machine contracts -- didn't want to upset their free-spending benefactors.

Kudos to the iconoclasts in Ohio for doing their job -- and particularly to Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner who has become a vocal critic of the voting machine companies.

And a huge raspberry to voting officials across the country who didn't catch the lost votes.

How many elections might have come out differently had this problem not been in place for ten years without being caught?

Read more in The Trail, in the Washington Post: Ohio Voting Machines Contained Programming Error That Dropped Votes