By KWMU / AP
St. Louis, MO – The St. Louis City Election Board on Monday picked the company it will buy new voting machines from.
The Board went with Diebold Systems to supply both optical scan and touch screen machines for the city. Jefferson and St. Charles County have also bought Diebold machines.
The board also says the new machines will cost less than the amount of federal money it has received, which means the city won't have to chip in any local funds.
QUESTIONS IN FLORIDA
The decision by the St. Louis Election Board comes just days after Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said the state should review the way it tests electronic voting machines, after a local elections official said the devices could be hacked to change race outcomes.
Bush's remarks came after Florida's acting Secretary of State, David Mann, said he was confident in the process of certifying voting machines.
A county elections supervisor in that state had requested state elections officials do "further investigation" of Diebold Election Systems Accuvote 2000, after citing county internal tests that showed the optical-scan machine's memory card produces false results when hacked by elections office insiders.
But a Diebold spokesman questioned those tests, saying they didn't replicate real-world conditions. The tests involved optical-scan machines that use paper ballots voters mark with pencils. The ballots are fed into scanners that record the results onto the memory cards, which are then tabulated by a central computer.
Some critics prefer the machines because any discrepancies can be resolved by recounting the paper ballots.