Voting Machine Mess-up Du Jour (Displayed 11/05/04 - 11/06/04)

Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. November, 2004. Microvote. Machine tally was wrong; required manual recount. Electronic voting machines rejected from Montgomery County, Pennsylvania and purchased for use in Mecklenburg County continue to miscount votes.*
	According to election-office data downloaded by the Observer, 102,109 people voted early or returned valid absentee ballots. But unofficial results show 106,064 people casting early and absentee votes for president. Dickerson suspected that some results may have been counted twice. "Our job will be to find which ones," he said Thursday morning.
But he was wrong. A news release from the Mecklenburg County Board of Elections shows that some candidates' gained votes from the manual recount of the paper tape printed by the machine.** It appears that the machines or the accumulation software simply tallied wrong — as happened in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Was the paper tally correct?

* County retallies early-vote results: Will recount affect Democratic commission sweep? The Charlotte Observer. November 4, 2004. By Richard Rubin and Carrie Levine, Staff Writers.
Early vote tally glitch may change Mecklenburg commission results. New Observer. November 5, 2004. The Associated Press.

** Board of Elections Audits Early Voting Results; Revises Unofficial Results Released by the Mecklenburg Board of Elections. November 4, 2004.

See: Microvote in the News

There's really no way
that I could prove to a voter,
post tally, that their vote
exactly counted the way that they voted it.
~ James M. Ries Jr.
President of Microvote