Warning light came on, state tests reveal
November 18,2004
JANNETTE PIPPIN
Jacksonville DAILY NEWS STAFF

BEAUFORT - When Carteret County submits its report next week to the state elections board, the document will include test results from the county's now-notorious electronic voting system.

State Board of Elections Executive Director Gary Bartlett and three of his staff members simulated an election at the Carteret County elections office Tuesday and watched to see exactly how the electronic equipment reacted.

The state board is gathering all the information it can before a Nov. 23 meeting to discuss Carteret County's Election Day problems in which 4,438 ballots were lost.

"We want to present all the facts that we possibly can as it relates to this issue," Bartlett said.

Only 3,005 of the electronic ballots cast during the early voting period were properly tallied. County officials have said they were misinformed about the system's storage capacity. They believed it could hold up to 10,500 ballots when, if in fact, 3,005 was the limit.

In all, 7,536 voters cast early ballots. Of those, the 3,005 valid electronic votes and 93 curbside votes verified by paper ballot were counted.

Since then, one question that has surfaced is whether there was proper warning that the storage capacity had been reached.

Once vote 3,016 was cast during Tuesday's mock election, a message reading "Voter Log Full" appeared in a text window on the control unit operating the 12 ballot machines, Bartlett said.

He said the fact that the warning did not appear until after vote 3,005 could be due to variations in the types of ballots cast Tuesday as compared to those cast during the real election. For instance, he said, there are differences in straight and split tickets.

While the warning message did show, it did not appear continuously, Bartlett said. The message would disappear from the screen after the machine was reset for the next vote, he said.

"It might pop up a second or it might be (longer) depending on how long before the next vote," Bartlett said.

Carteret County Board of Elections Chairman Ed Pond has said in correspondence to the equipment manufacturer that such a message was never detected or noticed during the early voting period. And the numbers counted by the control unit always matched with the number of voters in the poll books, election officials said.

The fact that the machine continued to count ballots even after storage capacity was reached was also confirmed during this week's re-creation.

"The vote total kept going on the counter even though" the storage limit was reached, Bartlett said.

Bartlett said all information will be presented to the state Board of Elections to consider how best to resolve the issue.