Voting machines in Ohio contain critical programming error.

A voting system used in 34 states contains a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point, the manufacturer acknowledges.

The problem was identified after complaints from Ohio elections officials following the March primary there, but the logic error that is the root of the problem has been part of the software for 10 years, said Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold.

The flawed software is on both touch screen and optical scan voting machines made by Premier and the problem with vote counts is most likely to affect larger jurisdictions that feed many memory cards to a central counting database rapidly.

We have these exact same machines in Alaska.

I have already written a letter to the editor about this problem and how important it is to change out these machines to insure the integrity of our elections.

The fact that we still have these machines in the system after eight years of reported glitches is a criminal act, and the blame should land firmly on the shoulders of the Republicans who are in charge of the voting in not only Ohio and Alaska, but also many other states which also have these machines just waiting to be tampered with by those who want to steal our democracy right out from under our noses.

Until this serious problem is addressed we CANNOT trust the integrity of our election process.