March 24, 2006

Vendor reneges on promise to fill voting-machine order

"A company hired to supply 267 electronic voting machines to the county by May’s primary election now says it will deliver less than half that amount.

This is the second time in two months a voting-machine company has not been able to deliver what the Lebanon County commissioners thought it had promised.

In January, the commissioners approved the purchase of 267 iVotronic touch-screen voting machines at a cost of $2,700 each from Nebraska-based Election Systems and Software.

The county was among the first in Pennsylvania to place an order with ES&S and were told the machines would be delivered on a first-come, first-served basis.

That promise was crucial to the commissioners’ decision to go with ES&S, Commissioner Jo Ellen Litz said yesterday, because the electronic machines must be in place by the primary to comply with the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002. The act, passed in the wake of Florida’s hanging-chad debacle of 2000, mandates that all punch-card and lever-voting machines — like those the county has used for the past 50 years — be replaced with electronic machines.

The commissioners were anxious to strike a deal with ES&S because they had already been burned by AccuPoll, the company they had contracted with in December that unexpectedly backed out of the deal.

The county and ES&S reached an agreement Jan. 26, and a dozen iVotronic machines were scheduled to arrive at the end of March so poll workers could begin training on them. The rest were to be delivered in April, according to county officials.

But that all changed this week, Litz said, when the county received a letter from ES&S explaining it wanted to cut the number of machines in order to supply machines to its other Pennsylvania customers, making them HAVA compliant."

The story is here.

Posted by Randy Riddle at March 24, 2006 10:54 AM