| Date |
Problem Type |
State
|
Vendor
|
Description
|
| 2/6/2008 |
Provisional ballots |
CA |
|
Santa Clara County. At least two precincts ran out of provisional ballots. "In 37 years of volunteering at polls, on-duty volunteer Betty Britton said she couldn't recall another year when provisional ballots ran out."
Story
Archive |
| 2/6/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
IL |
Sequoia |
Cook County. Election returns from the first precinct of the Second Ward in Evanston were missing 247 of its 540 ballots, said poll watcher Shannon Seiberling. The polling place uses a mix of optical-scan and computerized voting systems. Seiberling said the error probably occurred while poll workers were compiling the digital results from the four touch-screen voting machines at the polling place, when the scanner was supposed to add its total automatically. The number of missing votes equals the number of paper ballots that were scanned, though, according to the article, there is no way to determine whether this is what caused the discrepancy.
Story
Archive
Story2
Archive2
|
| 2/5/2008 |
Registration errors |
AZ |
|
Three problems cropped up in early reports from Arizona: (1) voters were told they had already requested an early ballot, but denied having done so, (2) voters were told their names did not appear on the voting roster, and (3) polling place consolidation caused confusion, lines, and delays.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Ballot printing |
CA |
Sequoia |
Riverside County. A printing error scored as many as 60,000 absentee ballots so deeply that they fell apart when voters removed them from envelopes. That problem was slowing a team of 16 election workers, who were painstakingly hand-copying the last of roughly 35,000 ballots onto intact ballot cards Monday night.
Story
Archive
Feb. 16, 2008. This follow-up article indicates about half the number of problem ballots. It says, "about 13,000 of the estimated 18,000 defective ballots handled by the registrar's office have already been duplicated for counting. Dunmore said the ballot vendor, K&H Printers of Washington, absorbed the cost to reprint and mail additional ballots."
Story
Archive
|
| 2/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Sequoia |
San Francisco. The Sequoia touchscreen froze while a voter was attempting to vote. After he inserted the plastic activation card into the machine, "Nothing moved--neither touching nor talking to the machine worked. What's worse, the card was now stuck in the machine as there was no eject button or function. The clerk who handed me the card was confounded. ... [After consulting another clerk,] the clerk then proceeded to lift the back of my voting machine up, slapping it hard so that it must have told it to reboot itself. ... After the two-minute reboot, voting was simple."
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Malfeasance |
CA |
ESS |
Los Angeles. The electoral inspector at the Westside Jewish Community Center says he still has not received voting equipment, hours after polls opened. Bernie Cade says he has not received voting machines or the ink that goes in them for any of the seven booths in the polling station. Dozens of people were sent to other polling places nearby. Los Angeles County Registrar's office spokeswoman Grace Chavez says someone with the equipment should be on their way soon.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Poor design |
CA |
ESS |
Los Angeles. The Los Angeles system requires that decline-to-state voters not only ask specifically for a Democratic ballot - but also fill in a special bubble on the ballot indicating their desire to vote on the Democratic presidential ticket. Failure to fill in the bubble voids their presidential ballot. There are 776,000 "decline-to-state" voters in LA.
Story
Archive
Story2
Archive2
Election officials are concerned that "double bubble" ballot design flaw could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters.
Story
Archive
|
| 2/5/2008 |
Too few ballots |
CA |
|
Contra Costa, Alameda, and Santa Clara Counties. Eight precincts in Contra Costa ran short of Democratic ballots. Alameda also reported shortages and had to send hundreds more out to the precincts.
Story
Archive
Eventually fourteen precincts in four cities in Alameda County ran out of ballots and voters voted on photocopies.
Polling places across Santa Clara County ran short of Democratic primary ballots, forcing poll workers in some places to turn to Vietnamese and Chinese language ballots, sample ballots torn from election pamphlets and ultimately notebook paper.
Story
Archive
|
| 2/5/2008 |
Vote suppression |
CA |
|
Contra Costa County and elsewhere. Independent voters showed up to the polls and poll workers told them erroneously that they could not get a nonpartisan ballot, a Democrat Party ballot or American Independent party ballot. One man e-mailed from El Granada to say he was given no choice in voting for president.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
CT |
Diebold |
Manchester, County. An optical scanning machine did not work and voters had to put their ballots in an auxiliary slot to be counted later.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
CT |
Diebold |
Six optical scan machines used in the state had to be replaced with back-ups, three due to improper programming.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
CT |
|
A "system crash" prevented officials from providing final registration numbers just before the primary.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Too few ballots |
CT |
|
Several towns had to photocopy ballots, and officials in Stratford put a call out to the town's printer to order new ballots long before the polls closed at 8 p.m. The shortage meant delays in counting votes where towns made copies because copies cannot be read by the optical scan machines.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
E-pollbook |
GA |
Diebold |
Atlanta. Computers used to check voters in kept crashing, causing long lines with up to an hour and a half wait.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
E-pollbook |
GA |
Diebold |
DeKalb, Fulton and Cobb counties. Long lines formed at polling places. Additional voter processing stations were added at some locations. Articles suggest the problems were caused by e-poll books -- used to check in voters -- crashing.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
GA |
Diebold |
Atlanta. Lines reached 90 minutes long at one Atlanta middle school where equipment kept crashing; elsewhere, voters had to wait in lines of up to two hours and people turned away from polls after seeing how long they would have to wait. At another precinct, voting was delayed when only one of five voting booths were working and election workers had to hand out 75 paper ballots. Elsewhere, a precinct opened only to discover the wrong keys had been delivered with its new electronic voting machines.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
GA |
Diebold |
McIntosh County. Diebold e-voting machines failed to work when the polls first opened.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Too few machines |
GA |
Diebold |
Atlanta. Voters complained of too few machines in some polling places, causing long lines.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Deceptive practices |
IL |
|
Chicago. City election board spokesman James Allen said that some poll workers told incredulous voters—including one spouse of an election judge—that the stylus used for touch-screen voting was actually an inkless pen to fill out paper ballots. Naturally, the scanner rejected the ballots, but the poll workers overrode the scanner and recorded the blank ballots. By 3 p.m., only five of the 20 voters had been contacted to return to recast their votes.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Deceptive practices |
IL |
|
Chicago, Cook County, Kane County, DuPage County, Jackson County. Suppression of Green Party voters.
Voters attempting to vote in the Green Party primary encountered suppression and intimidation. Poll workers claimed there was no Green Party ballot; claimed there was no GP primary because the candidates had all dropped out; and tried to give the voters Democratic ballots (with a green tag). Some polling places had only a few GP ballots; others had them wrapped up and out of site. Judges behaved rudely, intimidating other Green Party voters at some sites. At others, voters were only offered touch-screen ballots, not paper ballots. With persistence, some of the voters were able to vote in the GP primary. Others, who were less persistent, were disenfranchised.
Story
Archive
|
| 2/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
IL |
Sequoia |
Chicago and Cook County. Voting was delayed at a number of Chicago polling places, and voters were turned away for many and varied reasons: touch screen voting not working; equipment delivered to the wrong location; a security found unconscious inside; voters locked out "for security reasons"; pollworkers not showing up; doors unlabeled and locked.
Several of the delays were at least one or two hours, some prompting orders to keep locations open later in the evening.
"Nonetheless, Chicago election officials claimed a "hugely successful" start, saying that only 9 of 2,579 precincts failed to open on time, and those by only 10 or 15 minutes."
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Wrong ballot |
IL |
Hart InterCivic |
Peoria County. "A handful" of voters in Peoria, Illinois received the wrong electronic ballots, with only federal candidates, not local ones. These were intended for people who moved within 30 days of the election. However, people who had not moved got the ballots, apparently due to election judge error. "What happened in the situation this morning was that the judge just pushed the wrong button and issued the wrong access code and, even though they're trained, did not look to see that it was a federal only ballot."
Also, 15-minute power outages resulted in some voters using emergency paper ballots to vote and re-booting of electronic voting machines.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
NJ |
Sequoia |
Hoboken. Both Advantage electronic voting machines broke down at one polling place, delaying voting. About a dozen voters were turned away.
Story
Archive
Story2
|
| 2/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
NJ |
Avante |
Warren County. Avante e-voting machines repeatedly gave voters "malfunctioning errors." Some polling places switched to paper ballots.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
NJ |
Sequoia |
Salem County. Votes flipped from Obama to Clinton on the AVC Edge touch screen.
Story |
| 2/5/2008 |
Poor design |
NJ |
Sequoia |
Hudson County. County Clerk Barbara Netchert told The Jersey Journal that some poll workers -- in districts throughout the county although heavily in Jersey City -- were pulling the cartridges out of the Sequoia Advantage e-voting machines before closing the machines, resulting in them not registering properly.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
E-pollbook |
UT |
Diebold |
Davis County. The elections director reported "some glitches" with a new electronic check-in system: "The laptops were running slow on that check-in system, and some electronic readers weren't working well."
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
E-pollbook |
UT |
Diebold |
Davis County. Technical glitches with an electronic voter check-in created some long lines, said county elections clerk Pat Beckstead.
Story
Archive |
| 2/2/2008 |
Wrong ballot |
IL |
Hart InterCivic |
Kane County. The wrong electronic ballot was loaded into the eSlate voting machine for at least one voter. He accidentally cast his ballot before he realized he had not been able to vote on local races.
Story
Archive |
| 1/31/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
FL |
Diebold |
St. Lucie and Okeechobee Counties. Poll workers in several precincts in both counties were unable to transmit vote data electronically to the central office.
Story
Archive |
| 1/30/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
FL |
ESS |
Benton County. iVotronic touch screen machines failed to start properly in all three early voting locations on Tuesday. "(Each machine ) just didn't want to open right. (It was ) a glitch in the program," for the electronic voting machines, Brown said.
Story
Archive |
| 1/30/2008 |
Too few machines |
FL |
ESS |
Broward County. Unidentified problems with electronic voter check-in devices, confusion over how to use them, and too few of them in the polling places caused long lines and complaints from voters. Some voters gave up and left.
Story
Archive |
| 1/29/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
FL |
Sequoia |
Palm Beach County. Sequoia activator card failed. Also, the touch screen machines were mistakenly shut down early at one polling place and couldn't be turned back on. Replacements were brought.
Story
Archive |
| 1/29/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
FL |
Diebold |
Volusia County. The canvassing board found a four-ballot discrepancy in ballots from one polling site, so 3986 ballots will be rescanned. This is a machine problem previously known to Diebold.
Their advisory is here.
McFall said she received an advisory from the equipment's vendor last week saying similar problems had been encountered elsewhere. "The other sites balanced perfectly," McFall said. "I think it's the machine."
Story
Archive |
| 1/29/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
FL |
Diebold |
Sarasota County. Six optical scanners quit working and had to be replaced. Some machines had problems with the memory card, while others had a faulty scanner.
Story
Archive |
| 1/29/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
FL |
ESS |
Miami Dade and Broward Counties. iVotronic touch screen machines. Presidential candidates did not appear on the ballots of some voters, both Democrats and Republicans.
Story
Archive |
| 1/29/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
FL |
Sequoia |
Palm Beach County. A defective early-voting cartridge (electronic ballot box) prevented the county from completing the results. "Although a backup tape allowed elections staff to recoup the results, Anderson said the problem was so significant it may lead to the elections office having to reprogram all of its voting machines."
Story
Archive
Story2
Follow up 1/31/08.
Story3
Archive3
Archive2 |
| 1/29/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
FL |
Sequoia |
Palm Beach County. Voters reported malfunctions on the Edge touch screen machine. Some -- including Rush Limbaugh -- said the machine froze while voting. Some said their ballot was cast by the machine when they attempted to move ahead to the screen where they expected candidates to be listed.
Story
Archive |
| 1/29/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
FL |
Sequoia |
Hillsborough County. Some voters said their ballot was cast by the Edge touch screen machine when they attempted to move ahead to the screen where they expected candidates to be listed.
Story
Archive |
| 1/29/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
FL |
Sequoia |
Hillsborough County. Vote flipping on the Edge touch screen. "a voter would press the button for one candidate but the machine would read that vote as being cast for another candidate."
Story
Archive |
