50% of NY's new voting machines flawed ?

Wired has another chilling piece on voting machine flaws that are just on time for the upcoming elections in September and November(Presidential).

Douglas Kellner, co-chair of the New York State Board of Elections, expressed frustration with the vendor, saying it appeared that Sequoia was using the state's acceptance testing process to find problems with its machines in lieu of a sound quality-control process.

But Sequoia isn't the only problem, according to counties who have reported receiving problematic machines from the state Board of Elections after the board was supposed to have tested and certified the machines. The Board of Elections is examining all of the new machines before sending them out to counties.

In Nassau County alone, the largest voting district outside of New York City, officials found problems with 85 percent of the 240 ImageCast machines it received so far -- problems that the county characterized in a letter as "substantial operational flaws that render them unusable or that require major repairs."

The county rejected 48 machines right at delivery, due to physical damage. Another 58 machines exhibited problems during testing, according to William Biamonte, the Democratic elections commissioner for Nassau County. [New York counties have two election directors -- one each from the Democratic and Republican parties -- to avoid charges of unfair elections.] Some of the latter machines, he said, shook dramatically when they were running and workers either had to shut them down or the machines shut themselves down from the vibration. Other machines had dead batteries or batteries that wouldn't hold a two-hour charge, as they were required to do.

Another 112 machines produced a "printer failure" error message. Biamonte says this was the result of a change Sequoia made to its firmware. He said that when he received his first batch of machines about a month ago, the machines had "horrific paper jams." To fix the problem, Sequoia loaded new firmware on the systems to speed up the printer, but in doing so disabled the USB port on machines, resulting in the "printer failure" error messages.