Voting Machine Mess-up Du Jour (Displayed 07/09/04)

Bernalillo County, New Mexico. November, 2002. Sequoia election management software Approximately 25% of the votes were uncounted during the accumulation process.
	Although about 48,000 people had voted early on 212 Sequoia-supplied touch-screen computers at six sites in the county, the initial figures given to the commissioners indicated that no race - not even for governor - showed a total of more than about 36,000 votes.
The error went undetected for 10 days, when it was noticed by an attorney who had been monitoring the election for one of the candidates. Sequoia admitted that the same error had been encountered in Clark County, Nevada, several weeks earlier, but Sequoia had not informed the election officials in Bernalillo County.
	Commissioner Tom Rutherford accused Cramer [Howard Cramer, vice president and Western regional manager of Sequoia Voting Systems] of a "cover-up," and said Cramer had never intended to tell officials here about the problem. ... "We did not anticipate it would occur anywhere but in the Nevada election," he [Howard Cramer, vice president and Western regional manager of Sequoia Voting Systems] said. Sequoia's people here were not aware of the Nevada glitch, had not been alerted to watch for it, and had not been told how to fix it, he said. ... Upon learning Friday of the 12,000-vote gap, he said, Sequoia employees worked through the weekend in Denver to re-run the data - using the software patch this time - and make a new report that included the "missing" ballots.

* Election results certified after software blamed. Albequerque Tribune; November 19, 2002; By Frank Zoretich, Tribune Reporter

See: Sequoia in the News

Why are Sequoia employees
running New Mexico election data ... in Denver?
~ VotersUnite!