Equipment problems and bad testing lead to vote delays

January 10, 2007
By Jonathan Lipman Staff writer

Voting equipment suppliers built faulty machines and election officials failed to test it properly, say studies released Tuesday about the slow vote count in November's election.

A laptop-sized piece of equipment at each polling place that was supposed to total up and transmit the results from each precinct apparently had multiple problems.

And county officials unused to the complicated way their new voting systems had to interact didn't see it coming and didn't have good enough backups in place.

Those are the conclusions of both an expert panel convened by Cook County Clerk David Orr and a separate report from a technical consultant to equipment supplier Sequoia. Both Orr and Sequoia ordered the reports shortly after the November election, which saw hours of delay in tabulating suburban county votes.

"One piece of the very complicated technology didn't function the way it was supposed to," said retired U.S. Appeals Court Judge Abner Mikva, who headed the county panel. "We think there are ways to fix it or bypass it by February."

What went wrong with November's election seems to be different than what caused similar problems in March, when many election judges were apparently confused by the new technology. County and city officials responded by overhauling their training program.

"The irony is we spent a lot of time with our judges and didn't do all the testing we'd have liked," Orr said.

The biggest problem appeared to be with the transmission equipment in precincts. The equipment was supposed to try three times to connect to the county's database but it was set up to try only once.

"We made a mistake with the primary transmission system," Sequoia president Jack Blaine said at a news conference Tuesday.

Both Blaine and Orr stressed that no investigation found any problems with the accuracy of the vote count and that voters reported liking the new touch-screen and optical scan machines.

But the transmission problems and other problems with the tabulation software in the clerk's offices downtown created chaos on Election night.

Election judges thought about 90 percent of results had been sent in. Clerk's staff at backup transmission stations scattered through the suburbs thought only 3 percent of results were in, so they sent everything again.

In reality, about 56 percent transmitted properly from the precincts. But between bad readouts at the precincts and bad summary reports at the backup stations, nobody knew that.

The backup stations also had problems with their wireless transmission technology, which was not provided by Sequoia. Orr promised a more reliable, hard-wired system will be in place at those stations during the municipal elections in February and April.

Everything was tested before the November election, after problems with slow vote counting in the March primary raised concern. But county consultant Kevin McDermott said it wasn't enough.

"This was a technology implementation that was far more involved, far more complex than the clerk's office had seen before," McDermott said. "The level of testing was not up to the level of complexity that the new system demanded."

Mikva said he doesn't think Orr's office should be blamed for the problems.

"If the county had been willing to hire 5,000 experts, I suppose, to do all the testing six years in advance, maybe they could have seen it coming," Mikva said. "In the real political world in which we operate they couldn't."

Orr said his office is planning to hire staff with greater technical expertise to oversee elections in the future.

Blaine said Sequoia can make some fixes to the equipment right away, but others may take months.

"From an engineering standpoint, we can do it in time for the next election," Blaine said. "But there's an elaborate state and federal certification process if there are changes required to the (software), we cannot make it in time."

Orr said he's negotiating with Sequoia about withholding some of the $10.5 million the county owes the company until fixes are made.