Ohio Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Votes
Posted: Friday, Nov 05, 2004 - 05:05:13 pm PST
By JOHN McCARTHY   Associated Press

COLUMBUS, Ohio - An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.

Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. Bush's total should have been recorded as 365.

Bush won the state by more than 136,000 votes, according to unofficial results, and Kerry conceded the election on Wednesday after saying that 155,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted in Ohio would not change the result.

Deducting the erroneous Bush votes from his total could not change the election's outcome, and there were no signs of other errors in Ohio's electronic machines, said Carlo LoParo, spokesman for Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell.

Franklin is the only Ohio county to use Danaher Controls Inc.'s ELECTronic 1242, an older-style touch-screen voting system. Danaher did not immediately return a message for comment.

Sean Greene, research director with the nonpartisan Election Reform Information Project, said that while the glitch appeared minor "that could change if more of these stories start coming out."

In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost in Tuesday's election because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did.

And in San Francisco, a voting software malfunction could delay efforts to declare the winners of four county supervisor races.

In the Gahanna precinct, multiple copies of each ballot were recorded: two on the machine and three to a removable cartridge, said Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections. When voting ends, each cartridge is taken to one of five zones in the county, where the results were loaded into a laptop. Those results were transferred by secure data lines to the county.

Damschroder said the malfunction occurred when one machine's cartridge was plugged into a laptop computer and generated faulty numbers in several races. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred. He had, however, ruled out a problem with software at the central vote collection office, as well as tampering.

"We tested if there was some possibility of human intervention and it was not possible," Damschroder said.

Kimball Brace, president of the consulting firm Election Data Services, said it's possible the fault lies with the software that tallies the votes from individual cartridges rather than the machines or the cartridges themselves.

Either way, he said, such tallying software ought to have a way to ensure that the totals don't exceed the number of voters.

Damschroder said people who had seen poll results on the election board's Web site called to point out the discrepancy. The error would have been discovered when the official count for the election is performed later this month, he said.

The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race on the machine.

Other electronic machines used in Ohio do not use the type of computer cartridge involved in the error, state officials say.

But in Perry County, a punch-card system reported about 75 more votes than there are voters in one precinct. Workers tried to cancel the count when the tabulator broke down midway through, but the machine instead double-counted an unknown number in the first batch. The mistake will be corrected, officials say.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a glitch occurred with software designed by Election Systems & Software Inc. for the city's new "ranked-choice voting," in which voters list their top three choices for municipal offices. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes, voters' second and third-place preferences are then distributed among candidates who weren't eliminated in the first round.

When the San Francisco Department of Elections tried a test run Wednesday, some of the votes didn't get counted. The problem was attributed to a programming glitch that limited how much data could be accepted, a threshold that did not account for high voter turnout.

In New York, voting machine problems surfaced in a contested state Senate race. Elections officials disclosed in court that seals were missing or broken on 22 impounded voting machines.

Lawyers for both Republican and Democratic candidates said when a recount begins Monday, the machines' tally will be compared to written records logged Tuesday night. Differences could indicate tampering, they said, and the judge would have to decide how to count the vote.

The unofficial count has incumbent Republican Sen. Nicholas Spano ahead by 1,674 votes over Democrat Andrea Stewart-Cousins.