Greenwood Village-based Ciber Inc. has failed to win approval for its Alabama lab to test electronic voting machines for compliance with federal standards.
The U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Wednesday said it voted to terminate the company’s application for interim accreditation because it didn’t meet requirements to notify the commission that it had made key staff changes at the lab in Huntsville, Ala.
“They weren’t completely forthcoming about some staff changes,” said commission member Rosemary Rodriguez, a former Denver city councilwoman.
The commission temporarily barred the lab, the largest of its kind in the country, from approving new machines last summer after finding it wasn’t following its quality- control procedures.
Since that time, Ciber has continued to seek approval to test for voting machines’ compliance with 2002 standards.
It has also applied for certification to test for compliance with 2005 standards.
That application is still being reviewed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
“They will be working through that process. I don’t have any reason to believe they won’t make it,” said U.S. Election Assistance Commission chairwoman Donetta Davidson, former Colorado secretary of state.
Ciber chief executive Mac Slingerlend was traveling and couldn’t be reached for comment.
Labs that test voting software and hardware operated without federal scrutiny until last year, when oversight of voting-machine certification switched from the all- volunteer National Association of State Election Directors to the paid Election Assistance Commission.
Even though Washington and the states had spent billions of dollars to install electronic systems, manufacturers had always paid for their testing, and little had been disclosed about any flaws that were discovered.
As soon as federal officials began the new oversight program last July, they found problems with Ciber.
The unit that tests voting machines is a comparatively tiny unit of Ciber. As of January, it employed fewer than 15 of Ciber’s 8,250 employees and generated about $3 million of the company’s $956 million in annual revenues.
Staff writer Tom McGhee can be reached at 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com.
