Who Counts in New Hampshire? And, are Diebold memory cards forgetful?

Pokey Anderson interviews Dori Smith
Aired January 13, 2008

The Monitor, KPFT Radio, Houston

Transcript here: http://www.votersunite.org/info/WhoCountsNH.asp

In this interview, Dori Smith of WHUS looks at aspects of voting system security. Both her state of Connecticut and the state of New Hampshire contract with the same vendor, LHS Associates. LHS sells, maintains, and provides memory cards (the electronic equivalent of the ballot box) for the Diebold optical scanners used in these states, as well as in Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine.

Below, Dori asks NH Deputy Attorney Jim Kennedy about the practice of switching defective memory cards out of optical scan machines on Election Day, during elections.

NH Deputy Attorney Jim Kennedy: “That's not what's done in the state of New Hampshire. Actually by state and federal law we're required to retain the actual memory card that's used in the election and so to interchange a memory card I think would be odd.”

However, Dori’s interviews with NH election clerks tell a different story.

She also has discovered that failure rates on the Diebold optical scan memory cards approached 1 in 10 in some Florida counties. And, in Connecticut, a professor at University of Connecticut has discovered that a number of the cards have “junk data” on them.

MORE at http://www.votersunite.org/info/WhoCountsNH.asp