When the votes for Governor were recounted manually, it was discovered that the Ballot Now system had failed to read the votes on 24 scanned ballots. A white line extending the length of the page had caused the ballots to be treated as "damaged." However, rather than set up the system so that election officials examined the damaged ballots, the administrator had turned on the "autoresolve" feature, and the Ballot Now system misread the voters' intents.*

The county consulted with Hart Intercivic about the problem. On June 15, 2005, Travis Harrell, a manager at Hart InterCivic, reported the results of an investigation his company had been carrying out.**

2. Since the white line "whited out" a portion of each option box, Ballot Now was unable to detect at least 90 percent of each "target box" and therefore classified each contest in the 4th column of each ballot as a Damaged Contest.

October 2005 update: VotersUnite received information pointing out that the User’s Guide for the Kodak scanner points out that a white vertical line on the image can be caused by a dirty imaging guide. The manual recommends that the imaging guide — and other internal part of the scanner — be cleaned after eight hours of use.

Apparently, neither Hart Intercivic’s Travis Harrel nor the Yakima County elections staff had read the user manual for the scanner.