A month after the election, it was discovered that 271 votes had not been retrieved from the memory cartridges and were never counted.*

"We found out all the votes were not counted," she said.

Smith said she contacted Sequoia Voting Systems Inc., the Oakland, Calif.-based hardware and software firm that provided the touch-screen system, and the company provided assistance in finding and correcting the problem.

"We walked it through," she said. "We easily got the votes out of those cartridges."

VotersUnite spoke with Ms. Smith and discovered that the voting machines had been left in test mode on election day, so the upload process had disregarded the votes. Problems had occurred with those machines and cartridges on election day, but Ms. Smith and her staff didn't understand their significance, since they had received no training on using the machines before the election.

1) Those three machines had not printed out the end of day report.

2) When they attempted to upload the three cartridges, the screen on the central computer went "blue" and they thought the card reader had failed. The Sequoia technician took the cartridges into his nearby office to use his card reader. Ms. Smith thought they had been successfully read, but only found out later that they had not.