The name may have changed, but the artist formerly known as Diebold—now Premier Election Solutions—is still catching heat over problems with its electronic voting machines. Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brenner is suing the firm, seeking unspecified damages for breach of contract and fraud. The suit blames faulty software for losing votes in 11 of the 44 counties that use Premier machines.

The company was already embroiled in a legal battle with Ohio's Cuyahoga county, one it filed preemptively in May after election officials there decided to mothball $22 million worth of Premier touch-screen machines. Premier had hoped to forestall any claims against it by seeking a declaratory judgment that it had met its obligations.

Premier's own analysis, taking a page from HAL-9000, points the finger at "human error," although it also blames a conflict with antivirus software for a glitch that caused several hundred votes to be dropped when they were first uploaded from memory cards to the county's servers. But the state says the company had certified the servers after the antivirus program was installed.

This isn't the first time Ohioans have experienced buyer's remorse over the company's electronic voting systems. As Ars reported back in 2006, an exhaustive study of that year's primaries found a host of serious problems related to the voting machines, ranging from inadequate poll-worker training to equipment malfunction.

Brunner has advocated reverting to a system of optically-scanned paper ballots, the solution endorsed in the 2006 study, though it would not be feasible to make the switch before November's elections at this point. Still, she says, Ohioans "should not be alarmed" as they head to the polls in the fall, pledging that officials will work to catch and correct any problems that arise. Forgive us if we remain skeptical.