That the commission is considering swapping out Diebold's TSX gear in favor of optical scan technology is noteworthy, said Steven Hertzberg, project director at ESI. "Diebold's rhetoric about the performance of its direct record electronic (DRE)-based election system does not withstand objective scrutiny, and the Cuyahoga Commissioners obviously now know this." He also said he believes the county spent more money, effort and energy evaluating the system than perhaps any other jurisdiction in the nation.

Diebold, however, is claiming its systems work very well with large numbers of voters. Diebold spokesman David Bear noted that the vendor has sold DRE systems in huge jurisdictions, including the states of Utah and Georgia, and the machines are able to support high numbers of voters there. Moreover, the issues in Cuyahoga County involving DRE use have tended to result from training issues and familiarity with the devices, rather than the performance of the technology itself.

Diebold also sells optical scan devices, which have their own advantages, as well, said Bear. "Cuyahoga County will make the decision appropriate to itself and we'll be there to work with it," he said.

Meanwhile, members of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have posted a draft set of recommendations () related to the use of voting systems. The federal agency develops and promotes measurement, standards and technology and in their paper, NIST researchers offered several recommendations for the 2007 Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines (VVSG).

Perhaps the most significant of the recommendations is that NIST believes there should be a requirement for software independence placed in the VVSG. Software independence means a system's electronic counts can be independently audited, or that there is an auditable paper trail, such as exists in optical scan technology. NIST asserted that DREs are software dependent -- that is, they don't produce a voter-verified audit trail.