Makers defend voting booths Tally errors blamed on polling workers  (NJ)

ROBERT STERN   The Times    01 March 2008

The manufacturer of Mercer County's 600 electronic voting machines reported yesterday that poll-worker error caused some machines to record inaccurate Republican and Democratic voter turnout totals in the state's Feb. 5 presidential primaries.

The problem related to California-based Sequoia Voting Systems' AVC Advantage machines may have affected as many as 30 or 5 percent of Mercer County's machines, county elections officials said.
Similar mistallies of voter turnout by political party were spotted in 29 Sequoia voting machines in five other counties around the state, according to the state Attorney General's Office, which oversees New Jersey elections.

At the behest of the Attorney General's Office and elections officials in the affected counties, Sequoia technicians inspected the equipment and the software to determine what caused the glitch in party-affiliation turnout totals. The firm said it concluded malfunctioning equipment was not the problem.

"We identified a way in which poll-worker error can result in the party turnout totals to be reported incorrectly," Sequoia announced in a statement posted on its Web site yesterday.

The problem that occurred, state and Mercer County elections authorities have said, was a mismatch by one or two voters per machine between the total Democratic and Republican ballots cast as tabulated by the machine and the party totals that should have been recorded in that machine.

Every machine correctly recorded all the votes cast for each candidate but up to 30 of the machines were slightly off in reporting the total number of Democrats and total number of Republicans who voted at that machine, elections officials in Mercer County explained.

The mix-up centers on a control panel on the exterior of each voting machine that poll workers use to activate the machine for each voter. In the case of a primary, poll workers use a keypad to the voter's party so the appropriate party's primary ballot is displayed inside the machine.

"This scenario takes place through an unusual sequence of poll-worker actions ... that does not follow the prescribed election and machine procedures," according to Sequoia's statement.

The Attorney General's Office said only that it is reviewing Sequoia's findings in conjunction with county elections officials.

"We are working with the county elections officials to verify Sequoia's information," said Lee Moore, a spokesman for the Attorney General's Office, in an e-mail.

Although Mercer County Board of Elections Chairman Dominic Magnolo and other county elections officials said they will defer to the Attorney General's Office before accepting Sequoia's conclusion, Magnolo said he suspected that poll-worker error, rather than malfunctioning equipment, may have caused the problem all along.
 "I thought that maybe the poll workers inadvertently and under extreme pressure (due to a record-setting turnout)," keyed in the wrong party affiliation prior to a vote being cast in some of the machines, Magnolo said.

Even so, Magnolo said he isn't necessarily ready to accept Sequoia's findings.

It is the county board of elections that oversees poll workers; a separate office, the superintendent of elections, is in charge of the voting machines; and yet a third office, the county clerk, certifies election results.

If it turns out that Sequoia's conclusion is correct, Magnolo said the board of elections will renew its efforts to make sure the county's approximately 1,000 poll workers are properly trained on the machines to avoid a recurrence, particularly in districts where discrepancies in party-by-party turnout totals showed up.

He said neither electronic nor the county's old manual voting machines are immune from human error.

Mercer County Superintendent of Elections Bettye Monroe said that, regardless of the cause of the glitch, it had no bearing on the election results. She admonished county Clerk Paula Sollami-Covello for having said last week that some kind of software or hardware problem with the machines apparently caused the discrepancies.

Monroe also criticized county Executive Brian M. Hughes for being quick to assume that the Sequoia equipment isn't working as it should.

"Poll workers evidently did something they weren't supposed to do," Monroe said, while emphasizing that the final conclusion has to come from the Attorney General's Office. "Everybody blew it out of proportion, like Paula Sollami. She has no jurisdiction over the voting machines."

"They all jumped to one conclusion: that there's something wrong with the voting machines, and that's not the answer," Monroe said.

Hughes said that no matter what caused the discrepancies in the voter turnout totals in some machines, there would be fewer misgivings about Sequoia's equipment if the machines were retrofitted with a verifiable paper record of votes cast that each voter can inspect if the software used open source code, rather than Sequoia's own proprietary code.
 "We wouldn't have to rely on Sequoia experts to monitor Sequoia machines," Hughes said, likening that situation to the fox guarding the henhouse.

Sequoia said it is working with New Jersey elections authorities and its county clients on a way to prevent poll workers from making the same error in the future.

"Sequoia's developers have identified a simple configuration change ... that can be undertaken by our customers as part of the election set-up that will prevent this issue from occurring," the firm said in its statement.

Sequoia has not encountered this discrepancy anywhere before, although it could occur in Advantage machines in any state, company spokeswoman Michelle M. Shafer said in an e-mail. She said Sequoia's Advantage machines have been in use throughout the country since the 1980s.

"However, it takes erroneous poll-worker interaction to occur poll workers accidentally pressing incorrect buttons out of sequence and not according to election procedures," Shafer wrote.

Making the machines foolproof to this kind of poll-worker error is a simple matter of system reconfiguration that won't cost Sequoia or its customers anything, she said.

All 21 New Jersey counties rely on electronic voting machines, with the Sequoia AVC Advantage the device used in 18 counties, which have 10,483 of those machines, according to the state Division of Elections.