An electronic voting machine made by Premier Election Solutions (Diebold) has been found to flip votes repeatedly to Republican candidate John McCain. A local election official in Adams County responded to the complaint by halting the machine's use and sequestering it, so it could be examined for evidence of tampering and/or persistent malfunction.

The Colorado Independent reports that:

An electronic voting machine in Adams County repeatedly failed to accept a vote for a Democratic state Senate candidate — instead registering the vote for her Republican opponent — at an early voting site last week and has been removed from service, the Aurora Sentinel reports Wednesday. Adams County Clerk and Recorder Karen Long told the newspaper the error doesn’t reflect wider problems in the county’s voting systems, but the candidate said the incident could lead to a lawsuit.

The Diebold Accu-Vote machine involved in the Adams County case has been reported to have had vote-flipping problems in the past. Computer scientists have disagreed over what could explain the flipping, with many suggesting the devices' tendency to flip pro-Republican could not be explained by a routine persistent malfunction, unless there were some piece of computer code that was prompting them to do this.

The machines were a persistent problem in the 2004 Kerry-to-Bush vote-flipping scandal that has plagued election officials in the state of Ohio. The manufacturer, Diebold, has been investigated for potential criminal wrongdoing in California, Florida, and other states, has faced an SEC probe and Justice Dept. investigation for deceptive business practices, and has since changed its name to Premier Election Solutions.

This year, millions of Americans will be casting ballots, or have already done so, on machines that leave literally zero verifiable evidence of the voter's intent. Aside from violating the law in most states —which tend to require specifically that voter-intent be the measure of what is counted in vote-counting—, this fact means the entire election process itself is in question. Many states have required, or have been ordered by federal courts to provide, emergency paper ballots, in case of malfunction or suspicion of tampering with electronic machines. [CafeSentido.com]