One early-voting touch-screen machine was left in test mode during the early voting period. It reported zero votes, since all the votes cast were recorded as test votes. Seventeen days after the primary, the error was caught and the 245 "test" votes were added into the results.*

And the machine reported zero votes.

I talked to [County Registrar] Buddy Johnson on Monday. He was frank about what happened. The machine was left in test mode; his procedures had not contemplated such a possibility.

"It would not leap out at you," he said, "that this was in test mode." The printout the machine produces indicated a test, Johnson said. But the poll workers had not been trained to look for it.

The match between sign-ins and ballots cast is rarely 100 percent. Some people bail out without voting, and others don't complete the ballots. Those are called undervotes.

"It didn't make a lot of sense that there was that many undervotes," Johnson said of the library situation. So officials began looking for other explanations.

They found the answer Friday. On the machine mistakenly left in test mode, the votes were collected in a way that wouldn't be read later when the machine's data cartridge was fed into a tabulating computer.