Voting Machine Mess-up Du Jour (Displayed 07/16/04)

Wake County, North Carolina. November 2002.
ES&S iVotronic paperless touch-screen voting machine (ver.6.2.0.1)

Machines lost 436 ballots in early voting. When the county director of elections contacted ES&S, company officials admitted that they knew the firmware was flawed. Jackson County had previously had the same problem, and the company had replaced it with version 6.2.1.3, which the Jackson County Director said had showed no problems.*

One of the safeguards Wake County put in place helped election officials sort out the problem. During early voting, every ballot -- whether cast on paper or electronically -- is numbered at the top. Election officials are cross-referencing the numbers to find out which ballots were counted and which ones were not.

Officials noticed the problem Sunday night when the number of ballots cast did not match the number of ballots counted.

* Electronic Miscounts and Malfunctions In Recent Elections. Page 29.

See also: ES&S in the News

For all of the yelling and screaming,
there has never been one documented case
of any vote being improperly calculated or reported
with touch-screen machines.
~ Harris Miller (July 13, 2004)
Information Technology Association of America
(which represents electronic voting machine makers)