News

Story retraction: U.N. voting kiosks

October 4, 2006

Dear Readers,

First and foremost, this news portal supports the progress of the self-service industry. The industry is small, with many credible participants, and we prefer to take an open-minded, all-inclusive approach to the statements of industry participants. Very rarely—in fact, the occasion of this note is the first time we can remember—this approach gets us into trouble.

We recently published a story titled "U.N. orders 60,000 to 120,000 voting kiosks." This item was a report from the floor of the Self-Service & Kiosk Show, and as many such show items do, relied on a single source of information; in this case, the source was Steve Kroll, the president of ezscreen, who said his company had signed an agreement with the United Nations to sell 60,000 to 120,000 electronic voting devices. Since then, conflicting information from the United Nations and the original source has raised sufficient doubt about the existence of the deal that we have retracted the story by deleting it.

Mr. Kroll discussed the deal during an interview from the show floor. Many readers who exhibited at the show participated in similar interviews, to discuss their exhibits and company news. It was then that Mr. Kroll said, verbatim and on-the record, "We were contracted by the U.N. to develop a touchscreen voting machine." He went on to explain that his firm would build 60,000 to 120,000 of the machines (to which we referred in standard industry parlance as "kiosks"). Kroll said they measured 19.25" x 19.25" x 5 3/8", that they would be shipped to Nigeria and, from there, throughout Africa. When asked if he had a signed contract to this affect, Mr. Kroll responded in the affirmative, saying the deal was signed two months prior to the show. He said each unit would cost $1,000 to $1,500. We ran the story, based on Kroll's on-the-record statement, as we do most exhibitor news from tradeshows. We planned to follow the initial report with an in-depth feature, given the large scope of the deployment.

After asking the United Nations for details of the "contract," we received the following in response from U.N. communications director Cassandra Waldon, indicating that the U.N. was involved in no hardware procurement whatsoever:

"Neither the UN nor the UN Development Programme is involved in, or aware of, these voting kiosks for Nigeria," Waldon said. "UNDP is working with the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on capacity building, technical assistance and support to civil society organizations. We are not involved in any hardware procurement (no kiosk, no ballot paper, no ballot boxes) nor the actual conduct of the elections. There is a national electoral body constitutional assigned this responsibility."

Mr. Kroll, who was not present for a scheduled Tuesday morning phone interview on the subject of the U.N. voting kiosks, replied to Waldon's e-mail via e-mail.

"I never went into specifics about the United Nation's involvement or deployment plans beyond the intended initial use in Nigeria," Kroll wrote. "I did, however, state that this project was at the prototype approval stage for a final determination on its production of 60~120K for 2007. I did not state we had a contract for production, rather I was very specific that I had a contract for the design of the final prototype."

Given these conflicting statements, we decided to pull the story.