Software flaw found in Florida vote machines

By Eliot Kleinberg
Cox News Service
Friday, November 05, 2004

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. ? It had to happen. Things were just going too smoothly.

Early Thursday, as Broward County elections officials wrapped up after a long day of canvassing votes, something unusual caught their eye. Tallies should go up as more votes are counted. That's simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone ... down.

It turns out the software used in Broward County can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward. Why a voting system would ever be designed to vote backward was a mystery to Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman. It had her on the phone late Wednesday with Omaha-based Elections Systems and Software.

Bad numbers showed up only in running tallies through the day, not the final one. Final tallies were reached by cross-checking machine totals and officials are confident they are accurate.

The glitch affected only the 97,434 absentee ballots, Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes said. They were all placed in their own precinct and optical scanners totaled votes, which were then fed to a main computer. That's where the counting problems surfaced. They only affected votes for constitutional amendments 4 through 8, because they were the only page that was exactly the same on all county absentee ballots.

The same software is used in Martin and Miami-Dade counties; Palm Beach and St. Lucie counties use different companies.

The problem cropped up in the 2002 election. Lieberman said that ES&S told her it sent the Florida Secretary of State's office software upgrades, but that office kept rejecting the software. The state says that's not true. Broward elections officials said they had thought the problem was fixed.

Secretary of State spokeswoman Jenny Nash said all counties using this system had been told that such problems will occur if a precinct is set up in a way that would allow votes to get above 32,000. She said Broward County should have split the absentee ballots into four separate precincts to avoid that and that a Broward County elections employee has since admitted to not doing that. But Lieberman said later, "No election employee has come to the canvassing board and made the statements that Jenny Nash said occurred."

Late Thursday, ES&S issued a statement reiterating it learned of the problems in 2002 and said the software upgrades will be submitted to Hood's office next year. It said it was working with the counties it serves to make sure ballots don't exceed capacity again and said no other counties reported similar problems.

"While the county bears the ultimate responsibility for programming the ballot and structuring the precincts, we ... regret any confusion the discrepancy in early vote totals has caused," the statement said.

After several calls to the company during the day were not returned, an ES&S spokeswoman said late Thursday she did not know whether ES&S contacted the Florida Secretary of State two years ago or whether the software is designed to count backwards.

While the problem surfaced two years ago, it was under a different Broward elections supervisor and a different secretary of state. Snipes said she had not known about the 2002 snafu.

Later, Lieberman said, "I am not passing judgments and I'm not pointing a finger." But she said that if ES&S is found to be at fault, actions might include penalizing ES&S or even defaulting on its contract.

"I want to fix this before the 2006 election," she said.