Last Minute Test For Voting Machines    (WV)

Staff    MetroNews   14 October 2008

"Disgusted!" That's how Kanawha County Commission President Kent Carper describes the error made by ES&S, the company that provides the West Virginia Secretary of State's Office with software for election machines.

A major programming error was brought to the attention of the Secretary of State's office Monday for the M-100 optical scanner. According to Kanawha County Clerk Vera McCormick, during a test of the ballot machines, those voting a straight Republican ticket but chose to vote for a Democrat in the race for Supreme Court still ended up with a straight ticket vote. "I'd say 99.9 percent of the people do not cross over. But you will have that one percent that is going to do a cross over,” she said.

Carper says this wasn't the fault of McCormick or the clerk in Jefferson County, but both were forced to do emergency tests of their optical scanners Tuesday, less than 24-hours before the start of early voting. "Here a vendor ed by the Secretary of State's office that AGAIN has failed to perform their responsibility,” Carper emphasized.

New PC cards were issued, the counties conducted emergency tests and everything is set to go. But Carper says that's not the point. "One of the most important things about an election is that you know in your heart that your vote counts and foolishness like this doesn't help,” he said.

McCormick stresses there is a series of checks and balances written into state election code that would have caught the problem but only after the election was over. "We always have a canvass after the election, that's an audit of your election. We do hand counts then. [Voters] shouldn't get discouraged,” she said.