| Date |
Problem Type |
State
|
Vendor
|
Description
|
| 12/8/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
NV |
Sequoia |
Elko County. 271 votes were not counted in the election because three of the Sequoia touch screen voting computers had been left in test mode on election day.
Archive |
| 12/1/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
WA |
ESS |
Skagit County. An investigation of anomalies in the recount of the governor's race led county officials to discover, from ES&S, that a vote is counted incorrectly in approximately 1 in 10,000 ovals read by their high-speed optical scanner. Since the governor's race had four options, the estimate is that 1 in 2500 votes was counted incorrectly. Votes counted incorrectly in Skagit County alone amount to half the margin between the top two candidates.
Story
Archive |
| 11/29/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
UT |
|
Grand County. "Despite glowing reviews from other parts of the country and a public relations campaign by Diebold Corp. lauding its equipment, the Grand County Council has passed along what it calls six extreme examples of inaccuracy in the equipment. The examples "are only a fraction of the errors that have surfaced regarding use of this new voting equipment," states a letter from the council to the state Election Voting Equipment Selection Committee." (touch screens)
Story
Archive |
| 11/23/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
FL |
Sequoia |
Palm Beach County. Review screen doesn't match selections. Poll worker agrees, after scrolling back through the selections.
Story
Archive |
| 11/23/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
IN |
ESS |
Vanderburgh County. At several polling places, the number of people signing in to vote Nov. 2 exceeded the vote totals, while at other places votes outnumbered signatures. The county uses ES&S iVotronic touch screen machines.
Story
Archive
|
| 11/23/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
MD |
Diebold |
TrueVoteMD's trained election observers 201 machine malfunction in the 108 precincts they observed, which represent 6% of the state's precincts. Among the problems were 42 instances of machine crashes, 30 screen malfunctions, 17 instances when votes were switched on the screen, 37 problems with the ballot encoder, and 16 incidents in which the ballot was incorrect or incomplete.
Story
Archive |
| 11/16/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
CT |
|
Norwalk. The state Elections Enforcement Commission will consider whether to penalize the city's registrars of voters for failing to fully merge the city's voter rolls with the state's centralized voter system. The registrars said they tried to comply with the Help America Vote Act, but experienced problems, such as the elimination of voters, each time the local rolls were converted to the state registry.
Story |
| 11/16/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
IN |
Diebold |
Ripley County discovered an error with Fidlar Election Co. optical scan memory cards, Ripley County Clerk Ginger Bradford said. The memory cards that count the votes in optical scanners had the wrong precinct labels, so the cards were sent back to the company to be reprogrammed.
Story
Archive |
| 11/16/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
IN |
ESS |
Brown County, which uses ES&S optical scanners, considered recounting votes in one precinct because the tally tape produced by the scanner showed 63 unvoted ballots. However, the law doesn't allow the election board to reject certification by the precinct board, so they didn't do anything.
Story
Archive |
| 11/16/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
IN |
ESS |
Carroll County, with optical scanners from Election Systems and Software (ES&S), had to handcount county council votes in its 19 precincts on election day. The Indiana Election Commission determined the computer program didn't comply with Indiana law for that office, Carroll County Clerk Laura Sterrett said.
Story
Archive
|
| 11/16/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
OH |
ESS |
Sandusky County elections officials discovered some ballots in nine precincts were counted twice. [ES&S optical scan] The county doesn't yet know how it happened.
Story
Archive |
| 11/16/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
UT |
|
Utah County. Improperly programmed and inadequately tested punch card machines failed to count 33,000 straight-party votes. Once the problem was corrected and votes counted, Bush' lead went from 66% to 85% in the county. Republicans in other races also posted significant gains.
Story1
Archive1
Story2
Archive2 |
| 11/16/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
UT |
|
Utah County. Because of inadequate testing, the county failed to find that the punch card readers were programmed incorrectly. "The test procedure would not have picked [the problem up] because the procedure itself was insufficient," Commissioner Jerry Grover explained.
Story
Archive |
| 11/16/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
WA |
ESS |
Grays Harbor County. Elections officials started recounting about 28,000 ballots on Tuesday after the ES&S Unity reporting system showed too many votes. After ballots were counted, the results were saved on computer disks and downloaded into another computer to keep a running tally. Some of the disks were apparently downloaded twice by mistake. The Unity software is supposed to prevent that from happening.
Story1
Archive1
Story2
Archive2
|
| 11/14/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
NE |
|
Lancaster County. While machines correctly fed themselves just one ballot at a time, their software at times incorrectly detected two ballots. The machines in all cases stopped short of actually counting two ballots, County Election Commissioner David Shively said, and instead responded by shutting down. Democratic party alleges there is no proof that the mechanical glitches that slowed counting Tuesday did not also skew the final figures.
Story
Archive |
| 11/13/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
FL |
ESS |
Orange County absentee ballot tabulator (ES&S) started counting backwards after 32767 ballots, causing the posted precinct-by-precinct results to show a 9,227 margin of victory for Kerry while the county summary report showed only a 827 margin of victory for Kerry. A similar discrepancy affected vote totals posted online for the U.S. Senate race between Republican Mel Martinez and Democrat Betty Castor.
Story
Archive |
| 11/13/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
IN |
Diebold |
Franklin County. Inadequate testing.Tests with Fidlar's optical-scan equipment before the election found no problems. Yet during the election, it gave straight-party Democrat votes to Libertarians, affecting the outcome of the county commissioners' race.
Story
Archive
|
| 11/13/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
NC |
|
Gaston County. About 12,000 votes cast in Gaston County have not yet been counted, elections director Sandra Page said Tuesday. Page said most early and absentee votes were not included in the county's unofficial election results because of a procedural error. The inclusion of the votes in the county's results, expected Tuesday afternoon, could change the outcome of several local and statewide races.
Story1
Story2
Story3
Archive3
The county pays a technician from Diebold to operate its systems on Election Day. That person was in charge of transferring early votes from electronic storage to the counting computer. Diebold believes the transmission was interrupted, said spokesman David Bear.
Story
Archive |
| 11/13/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
NC |
Diebold |
After data was transmitted from the precincts to the central station, it was discovered that there was no data for the Dallas precinct in the GEMS database. Office records from election night, kept by a staff member, showed that information was received, Gaston County Elections Director Sandra Page said. She believes the computer system recorded a successful transmission without receiving any data.
Story
Archive
|
| 11/13/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
NC |
|
Gaston County. The entire Dallas precinct (1209 votes) was omitted from the reported totals.
Story
Archive |
| 11/11/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
IN |
|
Franklin County. Optical scan equipment counted straight-party votes for Democratic candidates as Libertarian votes; 9 counties may be affected.
Democrats discovered the error in Franklin County, where ballots will be counted again tonight. The county's election equipment vendor, Fidlar, notified officials Wednesday of the error. Libertarian candidates received 7 to 8 percent of the votes in Franklin County, which is about 30 miles south of Richmond.
Story1
Archive1
A programming error in the Fidlar optical scan system caused the miscount. One race was overturned when the program was corrected.
Story2
Archive2 |
| 11/11/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
IN |
ESS |
Vanderburgh County. A power cord malfunctioned, delaying the vote-counting on ES&S iVotronics.
Story
Archive |
| 11/11/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
PA |
|
Mercer County. Director of elections and director of technology said a computer software problem (not voters incorrectly touching the screen) caused Unilect Patriot touch-screen voting machines to malfunction in about a dozen precincts. They said repeated calls to the manufacturer failed to resolve the problem. On some machines, voters were required to vote backwards, starting on the last page of the touch-screen system and working back to the front page, in order for their votes to be counted.
Story
Archive |
| 11/11/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
TX |
Diebold |
Collin County. Diebold touch screen voting machine locked up on election day. County officials couldn't retrieve the results, so they sent the memory card to Diebold labs in Canada so technicians there could get the totals. The mere fact that a piece of Collin County's election record left the country should be cause for concern. [Note: Diebold Election Systems is located in McKinney, Texas, the county seat of Collin County, Texas.]
Story
Archive |
| 11/10/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
AR |
ESS |
Carroll County. A ballot programming error by ES&S caused the ballots to be counted incorrectly. ES&S will supply a new chip for the Model 115 optical scanners and the county will rescan the ballots.
Story
Archive |
| 11/10/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
AR |
ESS |
Carroll County. Skewed results in the JP District 2 race were found to have been cause by a misprogrammed optical scan chip supplied by ES&S.
Story
Archive |
| 11/10/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
CO |
Hart InterCivic |
Boulder County. Some of the scanners (Hart Intercivic) were not functioning during part of the count. In addition, ballots had to be counted by hand because the barcodes weren't printed correctly "The programming of the scanners might also be to blame for not letting machines read bar codes that were off by an amount so tiny that it was not visible to the naked eye."
Story
Archive |
| 11/10/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
NC |
ESS |
In Guilford County, ES&S early voting machines had capacity problems, which affected anywhere from 6,000 to 20,000 ballots.
Story
Archive
The totals were so large, the tabulation computer threw some numbers away. Retallying changed two outcomes and gave an additional 22000 votes to Kerry. Story
Archive
ES&S explained that the Unity 2.2 tally software reached 32,767 (32K) and began subtracting from the totals (same as in Broward County). ES&S had known about the problem but not told its customers. Letter from ES&S (603K) |
| 11/10/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
NC |
Sequoia |
Buncombe County. Sequoia Advantage touch screen machines failed to display one of the races in two precincts. Officials estimate that as many as 500 or 600 voters were not given the opportunity to vote in the school board race.
Story
Archive |
| 11/10/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
SC |
|
Georgetown County. The initial count showed 64 more ballots than the recount on the Unilect Patriot electronic voting machines. "After Friday's recount, the number of total votes cast in the election changed from 25,848 to 25,784."
Story
Archive |
| 11/9/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
LA |
|
Morehouse Parish. In Precinct 30, 72 more people voted in the election than signed the register; 98 in Precinct 30-B; and five in Precinct 29.
Original Story
Follow-up article |
| 11/9/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
NC |
Unilect |
Carteret County. More than 4,500 votes irretrievably lost in coastal Carteret County could trigger a new statewide election if the official margin of victory in two Council of State races is close enough, state election officials said Monday.
Story
Archive |
| 11/9/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
NC |
ESS |
Craven County. Problems with Electronic Systems and Software Inc. iVotronic voting machines surfaced in one-stop early voting, requiring all screens to be replaced.
Story |
| 11/9/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
NC |
ESS |
Craven County. "A master terminal at the Vanceboro one-stop voting site did not require a password and resulted in an incorrect total in the presidential returns there." ES&S again.
Story
Archive |
| 11/9/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
OH |
|
Mahoning County. One precinct in Youngstown, Ohio, recorded a negative 25 million votes, which was discarded from official results. [ES&S iVotronic voting machines]
Story
Archive
|
| 11/8/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
FL |
|
Escambia County. According to county administrator Tony Sanks, on Tuesday night the county's memory pack receiver -- used to download each polling place's data -- did not function properly because of some bad circuitry.
Story
Archive
|
| 11/8/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
GA |
Diebold |
Election officials in Twigg and Hancock counties had early-morning difficulties programming the correct ballots into some of their systems.
The encoders built into the balky systems "were still encoded for the primaries, and they hadn't been updated,"
Story
Archive
|
| 11/8/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
SC |
Unilect |
The town of Lexington has 200 votes stuck in a Unilect Patriot electronic voting machine that malfunctioned and they can't figure out how to retrieve the data.
Story
Archive |
| 11/6/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
OH |
|
Mercer County. One voting machine showed that 289 people cast (punch card) ballots, but only 51 votes were recorded for president. The county's Web site appeared to show a similar conflict, reporting that 51,818 people cast ballots but 47,768 ballots were recorded in the presidential race, including 61 write-ins. It would appear that about 4,000 votes (nearly 7%) could be unaccounted for.
Story
Archive |
| 11/6/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
PA |
Unilect |
Mercer County. Problems shut down Unilect Patriot electronic voting machines for all or most of the day.
Story
Archive
|
