[Mb-civic] Two articles from Truthout on election problems

[Barbara Siomos]

Editors Note: While the first miscount did not effect the presidential
election, it could have, and we would never know. That's the problem -
or advantage - of using electronic voting machines without a paper audit
trail. -smg

Computer Loses 4,500 Votes in N.C. (article below this one....
barbara) 
 
    Broward Machines Count Backward 
    By Eliot Kleinberg 
    The Palm Beach Post 
    Friday 05 November 2004
 
    Fort Lauderdale - It had to happen. Things were just going
too smoothly.
 
    Early Thursday, as Broward County elections officials
wrapped up after a long day of canvassing votes, something unusual
caught their eye. Tallies should go up as more votes are counted. Thats
simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone . . . down.
 
    Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only
32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting
backward.
 
    Why a voting system would be designed to count backward was
a mystery to Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman. She was on the phone
late Wednesday with Omaha-based Elections Systems and Software.
 
    Bad numbers showed up only in running tallies through the
day, not the final one. Final tallies were reached by cross-checking
machine totals, and officials are confident they are accurate.
 
    The glitch affected only the 97,434 absentee ballots,
Broward Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes said. All were placed in
their own precincts and optical scanners totaled votes, which were then
fed to a main computer. 

    That's where the counting problems surfaced. They affected
only votes for constitutional amendments 4 through 8, because they were
on the only page that was exactly the same on all county absentee
ballots. The same software is used in Martin and Miami-Dade counties;
Palm Beach and St. Lucie counties use different companies. 

    The problem cropped up in the 2002 election. Lieberman said
ES&S told her it had sent software upgrades to the Florida Secretary of
State's office, but that the office kept rejecting the software. The
state said that's not true. Broward elections officials said they had
thought the problem was fixed.
 
    Secretary of State spokeswoman Jenny Nash said all counties
using this system had been told that such problems would occur if a
precinct is set up in a way that would allow votes to get above 32,000.
She said Broward should have split the absentee ballots into four
separate precincts to avoid that and that a Broward elections employee
since has admitted to not doing that.
 
    But Lieberman said later, "No election employee has come to
the canvassing board and made the statements that Jenny Nash said
occurred." 

    Late Thursday, ES&S issued a statement reiterating that it
learned of the problems in 2002 and said the software upgrades would be
submitted to Hood's office next year. The company was working with the
counties it serves to make sure ballots don't exceed capacity and said
no other counties reported similar problems. 

    "While the county bears the ultimate responsibility for
programming the ballot and structuring the precincts, we . . . regret
any confusion the discrepancy in early vote totals has caused," the
statement said. 

    After several calls to the company during the day were not
returned, an ES&S spokeswoman said late Thursday she did not know
whether ES&S contacted the secretary of state two years ago or whether
the software is designed to count backward.
 
    While the problem surfaced two years ago, it was under a
different Br oward elections supervisor and a different secretary of
state. Snipes said she had not known about the 2002 snafu.
 
    Later, Lieberman said, "I am not passing judgments and I'm
not pointing a finger." But she said that if ES&S is found to be at
fault, actions might include penalizing ES&S or even defaulting on its
contract. 
  
^    Go to Original    ^

    Computer Loses 4,500 Votes in N.C.
 
    The Associated Press 
    Thursday 04 November 2004 
    Jacksonville, N.C.

 More than 4,500 votes have been lost in one North Carolina county
because officials believed a computer that stored ballots electronically
could hold more data than it did. Scattered other problems may change
results in races around the state. 

    Local officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of the
county's electronic voting system, told them that each storage unit
could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes.
 
    Expecting the greater capacity, the county used only one
unit during the early voting period. "If we had known, we would have had
the units to handle the votes," said Sue Verdon, secretary of the county
election board. 

    Officials said 3,005 early votes were stored, but 4,530 were
lost.
 
    Jack Gerbel, president and owner of Dublin, Calif.-based
UniLect, said Thursday that the county's elections board was given
incorrect information. There is no way to retrieve the missing data, he
said.
 
    "That is the situation and it's definitely terrible," he
said. In a letter to county officials, he blamed the mistake on
confusion over which model of the voting machines was in use in Carteret
County. But he also noted that the machines flash a warning message when
there is no more room for storing ballots.
 
    "Evidently, this message was either ignored or overlooked,"
he wrote. County election officials were meeting with State Board of
Elections Executive Director Gary Bartlett on Thursday and did not
immediately return a telephone call seeking comment. 

    The loss of the votes didn't appear to change the outcome of
county races, and President Bush won the state by about 430,000 votes in
unofficial returns. But that wasn't the issue for Alecia Williams, who
voted on one of the final days of the early voting period. 

    "The point is not whether the votes would have changed
things, it's that they didn't get counted at all," Williams said.
 
    Two statewide races remained undecided Thursday, for
superintendent of public instruction, where the two candidates are about
6,700 votes apart, and agriculture commissioner, where they are only
hundreds of votes apart.
 
    How those two races might be affected by problems in
individual counties was uncertain. The state still must tally more than
73,000 provisional ballots, plus those from four counties that have not
yet submitted their provisionals, said Johnnie McLean, deputy director
of the state elections board. 

    Nationwide, only scattered problems were reported in
electronic voting, though roughly 40 million people cast digital
ballots, voting equipment company executives had said. 
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