Tarrant County elections officials report glitch
No local contest is altered as some votes counted up to six times
March 9, 2006; By JEFF MOSIER / The Dallas Morning News

FORT WORTH – A software programming error allowed some Tarrant County votes to be counted as many as six times during Tuesday's primary election, county officials said.

However, that did not change the outcome of any local races, election officials said at a news conference Wednesday. The mistake led the software to count the cumulative total generated every half-hour as fresh ballots during the next report.

"There was no problem at the precinct level," said Gayle Hamilton, interim county elections administrator. "The problem was here."

County officials said the only race potentially affected was the close contest between GOP incumbent Don Willett and challenger Steve Smith for the Texas Supreme Court Place 2 seat. It's not clear yet whether the new numbers would alter the outcome of that race.

David Rogers, campaign manager for Mr. Smith, said his candidate is considering asking the secretary of state for a recount. Mr. Smith originally lost by 21,000 votes, but the margin is now fewer than 5,000.

"That is less than 1 percent," Mr. Rogers said. "We are looking at the statute tonight, and we'll probably make a decision [about a recount] in the next 24 hours."

Ms. Hamilton said a couple of people mentioned Tuesday night that the vote tallies seemed unusually high, but she said she didn't look into it immediately.

"We should have stopped it right then," she said.

To explain the problem, county officials and a representative of the company that wrote the software broke down the Republican governor's race vote tallies originally posted on the Tarrant County Web site.

The first number reported – 1,352 votes – was correct. But the next counted those 1,352 votes twice and added that to the second vote tally – 5,046.

At that point, the count was 1,352 votes too high and would grow more inflated as the earlier vote tallies were counted over and over.

By early Wednesday, the Tarrant County Web site reported that 98,324 people had cast ballots in the GOP governor's race. The actual number was 28,374.

That huge number led some to question the figures.

"That would have been a record turnout," said Stephanie Klick, chairwoman of the Tarrant County GOP.

She said she didn't believe that the vote count could have been that high.

Art Brender, the county's Democratic Party chairman, said he too was suspicious.

"There just wasn't that kind of crowd at the polls," he said.

John Covell, a vice president at Hart InterCivic, which supplies the county with voting machines and software, said his firm's mistake did not affect any votes cast at the precincts.

The only problem was the calculations designed to give the public and candidates a running count.

"I take full responsibility," he said.

No race was altered by more than 1 percentage point, Mr. Covell said.

The county was using a large number of new machines from Hart InterCivic for the election. The new machines were similar or identical to the previous ones, but the software was different.

County officials hoped to have a precinct-by-precinct breakdown of the vote by this morning.

Staff writer Dave Michaels in Austin contributed to this report.