With about two months to go till Election Day, national media reports have led two local groups to question the accuracy and security of electronic voting machines used in DuPage County.

Meanwhile, election officials are seeking to assure voters that their ballots will be properly counted.

Questions about the accuracy of vote tallies have led several states to abandon the touch-screen machines that became widely used after the closely contested 2000 presidential race. A software glitch can reportedly cause the machines to drop votes as results are uploaded to a central computer.

As a result of such reports, the DuPage County Democratic Party and the local chapter of the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project are calling for an end to electronic voting in the county.

In a letter dated Aug. 25, county Democratic Party Chairman Bob Peickert expressed the party’s request that the DuPage County Election Commission “discontinue the use of the touch screen voting machines due to their lack of accuracy, security and reliability, and that the commission return to a voting system conducted entirely by the use of durable and reliable paper ballots.”

Bob Saar, executive director of the commission, said he was very upset with the company that makes the county’s voting machines for not informing customers about the potential problem and instead letting them find out through press reports.

The county’s voting equipment is made by Premier Election Solutions, a subsidiary of the ATM manufacturer Diebold. The commission is working with Premier to make sure all its questions and concerns about the machines are addressed, Saar said.

Despite questions about the reliability of the machines, Saar said the commission is sure there haven’t been any problems in the county since the machines were introduced in 2001. He said criticisms of the system are politically motivated.

“This system has been in use since 2001, and there hasn’t been one iota, one sliver of evidence that it hasn’t counted votes accurately,” Saar said. “To scare up the bogeyman 60 days before the presidential election is a disservice.”

According to documents obtained by the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project, one precinct of York Township showed zero votes in all races in the 2004 primary after results were uploaded from a memory card. The error was caught the next day during the auditing of the results.

Saar said there is no way to tell if this error was the result of a software glitch.

Melissa Urda, co-chair of the DuPage chapter of the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project, said the Election Commission should have been aware of concerns about the system well before the recent national reports.

“Bob Saar of all people in DuPage County, should be well aware of the problems with the Diebold/Premier machines ... since we have decried them for over three years now,” Urda said in a written statement. “Diebold even changed the name of its elections division to Premier to distance itself from negative publicity and lawsuits.”