- "Several Florida county officials have asked the
state to mandate a voter-verified paper trail in the state. But Gov. Jeb
Bush and state legislators have said they're not interested."
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- Six electronic voting machines used in two North Carolina
counties lost 436 absentee ballot votes in the 2002 general election because
of a software problem, raising increasing doubts about the accuracy and
integrity of voting equipment in a presidential election year.
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- Election Systems & Software said problems with the
firmware of its iVotronic touch-screen machines, used in a trial run, lost
ballots in two North Carolina precincts during the state's early voting
in 2002. ES&S, the largest U.S. maker of election equipment, is also
the focus of attention into lost votes last month in Florida during a special
election.
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- ES&S, Diebold Election Systems and other electronic-voting
machine makers are coming under increasing scrutiny about the accuracy
of their devices. The manufacturers claim their machines work fine and
don't need auditing mechanisms -- like printers that would give voters
receipts confirming their choices. But opponents are finding more and more
anecdotal evidence of discrepancies and anomalies. In addition, more election
officials and losing candidates are raising concerns as all U.S. counties
move to replace mechanical devices with computer-controlled touch screens.
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- "All of this just underscores the need for voting
machines to have a paper trail," said Stanford University computer
science professor David Dill, who runs Verified Voting, a group that is
pushing election officials and legislators to mandate voter-verified paper
ballots that provide a way to audit.
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- In the North Carolina case, a software glitch made the
ES&S machines falsely sense that their memories were full and an error
message displayed, said company spokeswoman Meghan McCormick in an e-mail
to Wired News.
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- "Because the memory-full message appeared very quickly,
some voters did not realize that their absentee vote had not been recorded,"
she added. "On election day, the election results were tabulated correctly
and the technical issue did not affect the outcome of the election."
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- "If this happened with one version of the firmware,
how can we be sure that it didn't happen with other versions of the firmware?"
asked Dill. "How can we be sure that other counties didn't lose votes
that they didn't catch?"
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- ES&S found the error in October 2002 during absentee
voting in Jackson County, North Carolina, and fixed the problem there.
But Cherie Poucher, director of the Wake County Board of Elections in North
Carolina, said ES&S didn't notify her of the problem, even though the
two counties were using the same firmware version.
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- During Wake County's early election, absentee voters
filled out an absentee ballot and submitted them to poll workers. Each
application had a computer-generated tracking number and before the voters
cast their ballot on one of six touch-screen machines, a poll worker keyed
the number into the machines. But when poll workers later compared the
number of votes on machines to the number of absentee applications, the
figures didn't match.
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- Poucher said her county immediately took the machines
out of service and called an ES&S official. Only then did ES&S
say that Jackson County, which used the same version of firmware, had experienced
a similar problem days earlier. Poucher then asked ES&S for an audit
trail to track down the lost votes. An ES&S technician visited Wake
County and tried to retrieve the data for the audit report, but had to
download the information onto a PC card and ship it back to ES&S central
offices. Two days later, ES&S e-mailed the audit report to Poucher.
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- Using that information, Poucher's office tracked down
the 436 early voters, notified them that their votes had been lost and
asked them to revote for the Nov. 5 election. All but 78 recast their vote
-- a number, she emphasized, that would not have changed the outcome of
the election.
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- "This was one week before a major election,"
Poucher said. "Our office is not used to having something major to
deal with at that time. It was a lot of added responsibility. We are viewed
in this area with high integrity; I had to work hard to get everybody to
understand that we were doing everything we could to keep that integrity."
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- Poucher decided not to use the trial touch-screen machines
in the general election. Instead, she replaced them with the ES&S optical-scan
system the county has been using since 1992. Because optical-scan voting
involves a paper ballot that gets scanned through a machine, all votes
would have a paper trail. Poucher sent ES&S a bill for nearly $6,000
to cover her office's scrambling.
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- The same ES&S iVotronic machines were implicated
in election votes lost last month in Florida. In that case, 134 votes went
uncounted in Broward County in a race to elect a state house representative.
The figure represented 1.3 percent of more than 10,000 residents who voted
in Broward.
-
- In a contest between seven Republican candidates, the
victor won by only 12 votes. To account for the lost votes, some speculated
that Democratic voters came to the polls, realized that no Democratic candidates
were on the ballot, and simply decided not to cast their vote.
-
- But Chas Brady, a spokesman for one of the losing Republican
candidates, told the St. Petersburg Times he found it hard to believe that
nearly 2 percent of voters took the trouble to go to the polls but didn't
cast their ballots.
-
- In the end, the what really happened can only be speculation,
because the voting machines left no paper trail to determine whether the
machines lost the votes.
-
- Several Florida county officials have asked the state
to mandate a voter-verified paper trail in the state. But Gov. Jeb Bush
and state legislators have said they're not interested.
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