Computer may have bungled Natrona County votes

Associated Press   23 August 2004

CASPER (AP) An apparent computer glitch resulted in improper tallying of votes cast in Natrona County during last week's primary, election officials said.

Correcting the errors changed the order in which some candidates finished but did not affect which ones advanced to the general election, County Clerk Mary Ann Collins said.

Collins said she noticed on Thursday that the number of votes that municipal candidates in Evansville received seemed low.
 

She checked the printout totals from the individual precinct voting machines against the computer software, called Unity, which adds up votes countywide and puts them in a readable spreadsheet.

What she found were different numbers but only in nonpartisan races.

On Friday, she sent the voting machine memory packs and memory pack readers to Omaha, Neb.-based Election Systems and Software, the company that designed and maintains the program.

Collins said the software cost $70,000. She has told the company she wants onsite technical support during the general election Nov. 2.

"I'm not going to go into the general election and not be comfortable," she said.

The county Canvassing Board was satisfied with the revised returns and certified the results.

The state Canvassing Board meets Wednesday to certify election totals statewide.