THE STORY SO FAR

 

Touch-screen voting machines used in 11 Florida counties, including Miami-Dade and Broward, have a software glitch that causes a failure to provide a consistent electronic log of the vote when the machine is asked to reproduce what happened during an election.

The machine manufacturer and Lee County officials have known of the problem since the 2002 election. But the company has not yet obtained certification for a software patch.

In the meantime, the company has told elections supervisors that they can avoid the problem if workers download the information from each touch-screen machine onto a laptop computer.