US bars Ciber from testing e-voting terminals due to negligence

Call us crazy, but we had a sneaking suspicion all along that all these e-voting woes were due to a lack in quality control testing somewhere along the approval line, and now it seems the US government has found its scapegoat. Ciber, Inc., the Colorado-based company responsible for testing a majority of the nation's electronic voting terminals, "has been temporarily barred from approving new machines after federal officials found that it was not following its QC procedures, and moreover, could not document that it was conducting all the required tests." Aside from wondering where the oh-so-critical auditors were during this entire debacle (read: federal scrutiny of the testing began just recently), this brings into question the legitimacy of the votes that were actually placed and counted through the potentiallyfaulty machines, but alas, what's done is (presumably) done. Eager to keep that expectedly gigantic government contract money pouring in, Ciber seems to be on top of the issues at hand, and a spokesperson for the outfit even stated that "the company believed that it had addressed all the problems, and that it expected to receive its initial federal accreditation later this month." We just hope that undercover chess functionality somehow goes unnoticed.

[Via Slashdot]