GOUVERNEUR, NY - The Dominion ImageCast voting machines used in this year's Nov. 3rd election, both in the 23rd Congressional Special Election and in the local elections around the state have not been certified for use by the State Board of Elections.

Reports of bugs in the programming code, known security flaws, outright failures, and concerns over the potential for tampering have not prevented the State from calling the pilot program "very successful."

In her report on the pilot program to the State Board of Commissioners, Anne E. Svizzero confirmed problems in Jefferson, Lewis, Seneca, and Schuyler counties but failed to mention the failures and freeze-ups that caused the Democratic Party to order several of the St. Lawrence County machines impounded on election night. The State Board also has not commented on allegations of a virus in the machines in Hamilton County or why other counties were not made aware of the potential for a computer virus to infect the machines.

The Board of Commissioners is still awaiting a report from the manufacturer on the failures.

Ms. Svizzero confirmed that, just prior to the election, the source code that records the votes was altered in machines in at least 10 counties and that the new code has not been certified by the state.

A spokesman for Dominion maintains that the "virus" reports from Hamilton County were really a source code "bug" instead, one that required reprogramming of the source code in the days prior to the election.  Dominion indicates that their technicians "created a workaround" for some bad code that was causing the machines to freeze-up in certain types of elections.

Certification of the source code is necessary step to prevent issues like the State of Hawaii encountered during one of their first uses of the machines.  In the 2007 Hawaii election, computer source code errors allowed voters to cast hundreds of votes for non-existent candidates.

Faulty source code or deliberately altered code could cause the machines to count votes wrong.. either entering a vote for the wrong candidate, switching the vote counts, or failing to recognize votes for a certain candidate. Extensive independent testing is required before the State can certify that the code used to count the ballots is accurate and unbreakable.  The machines used in the 23rd Congressional Election have not undergone this testing.

Computerized voting machines were not used in the City of New York this election as the Board of Elections there refused to use machines that had not been certified by the State.

More than 20 counties in the State have passed resolutions banning the computerized vote-scanning machines.