Ballot diligence

The story of electronic-voting glitches in Ohio is likely to have a happy ending, thanks to the diligence of elections officials at the state and county levels.

Efforts by the Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner and Butler County officials helped bring a previously undetected computer-programming error to light. Some votes in the March 4 primary had been dropped in Butler and eight other counties using touch-screen machines supplied by Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold Election Systems.

Premier acknowledged last week that a source-code error caused votes to be missing.

Previously, the Texas-based company believed the dropped votes resulted from a conflict between its system and antivirus software but changed its position after additional testing was done.

Having been alerted to the problem, the 44 counties using Premier machines will have safeguards in place to prevent this problem. Voters should have confidence that their choices will be counted.

The technology of computer voting is frequently changing, and this sort of watchfulness is good.