Pender County Election Problems
WWAYTV3.com. July 21, 2004.

When just one electronic voting machine goes down it can throw a huge wrench in tallying election night results. That's not the only problem that cropped up on election day.

All of Pender County votes electronically, and the county has 74 of these machines. But on Tuesday, one of them didn't work.

"There was a machine that would not tally. We had the precinct workers bring in the machine for that and we had to extract those votes and count them manually," said Frances Pinion the Pender County Board of Elections Director.

Just up the road at the upper Topsail precinct officials dealt with another problem. The reason?

"It was not the machines. It was the precinct workers. They were using the incorrect card," said Pinion. To help out voters, the board extended voting time by another hour.

Believe it or not, Pender County wasn't the only county that had problems with the primary Tuesday. In New Hanover County, election officials say it was a smooth day until they brought the results to the New Hanover County courthouse.

"The server that the application runs on, that calculates the votes. I had a little problem with the server," said Jan Kavanaugh a programmer analyst with New Hanover County.

She says the data probably would have worked okay. But she just wanted to double check.

New Hanover County uses the optical scan method. They've used that method since the late 1980's.

By: Alex Lawson