"We were coming out with outrageous numbers, so we knew something obviously was wrong," Debbie McDowell, deputy director of the elections board, said Tuesday.
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Electronic voting machines cause problems nationwideby Madeline Zane, Unknown News
Nov. 6, 2003
. In Ohio, one candidate in a small district gets 16,000 votes, according to the magic picture box.
. In Virginia, voting machines are moved from polling places for repairs ... and then returned.
. In California, Diebold Voting Systems adds last-minute unauthorized software to their voting machines.
These are just the problems we know about so far, mind you.
Since most voting machines have no paper trail, and because the companies who own the machines aren't required to tell how the software works, God only knows if anyone voting on one of these machines are actually being counted at all.
Here are the early returns:
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Erie County has problems with voting machineAssociated Press
Nov. 5, 2003
SANDUSKY, Ohio (AP) — A faulty computer chip in one of the machines that count ballots at the Erie County Board of Elections delayed election results for hours on Tuesday night, a board official said. "We were coming out with outrageous numbers, so we knew something obviously was wrong," Debbie McDowell, deputy director of the elections board, said Tuesday.
"Unfortunately, it was the one (machine) we were doing absentees on, it's showing some guy in a small village with 16,000 votes." After determining one of the two tally machines had a faulty memory chip, the ballots that had already been fed through that machine had to be fed through the other one.
The results were finally ready around 1 a.m., McDowell said. Elections board Vice Chairman Chris Marinko announced around 10 p.m. the board members and office staff were having computer problems.
Voters in Erie County were deciding elections for the Sandusky City Commission, Sandusky School board, four levies and a bond issue. The computer software has been used dozens of times before, board member Ralph Henry said.
The system worked properly when elections workers tested it Monday afternoon, Marinko said.
Published by
Associated Press
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Voting machine glitches prompt GOP challengeby Eric M. Weiss and David Cho, Washington Post
Nov. 4, 2003
Widespread problems with new touch-screen voting machines delayed election results in Fairfax County Tuesday night and led to a legal challenge by Republican officials.
Nine malfunctioning voting machines were removed for repair and then put back in service, a move that Fairfax Republicans said broke election law. Several hundred votes were under scrutiny, not enough to affect the outcome of county-wide races.
A circuit court judge will hear arguments Wednesday morning on whether those votes should be set aside.
The new machines, meant to simplify voting, made the tallying of the votes more problematic, with more than half of precinct officials resorting to the old-fashioned telephone to call in their numbers or even driving the results to headquarters, elections officials said. A handful of precincts resorted to paper ballots.
Election officials said it was the slowest performance in memory for counting votes on election night in the county. The problem came when precinct workers tried to electronically send results from the 953 new machines to election headquarters, unexpectedly overloading computer servers.
When the electronic system of sending results over telephone modems failed, precinct workers tried to call in the results but were met with busy signals. Many decided it would be quicker to drive.
Some voters also complained about using the new machines, and officials said that resulted in slow going at some polling places during the day. For example, a line of 100 people snaked around the polling room at Sleepy Hollow Elementary School Tuesday morning, workers said.
Fairfax election officials expressed surprise at the glitches.
"I don't know what the holdup is," Margaret K. Luca (D), secretary of the county's three-person elections board, said late Tuesday night. "I thought we had it covered. We tested all week in the county."
Fairfax spent $3.5 million on 1,000 WINvote machines this year, part of a wave of new technology being introduced to voting booths in the wake of the ballot-booth drama of the 2000 presidential election. The machines, made by Advanced Voting Solutions of Frisco, Tex., resemble laptop computers without keyboards.
Fairfax and Arlington used the technology countywide for the first time Tuesday. Arlington reported no major problems.
The most serious complaints in Fairfax centered on the several hundred votes tabulated by nine problem machines across the county.
A hastily filed lawsuit by the Fairfax County Republican Committee and Friends of Mychele Brickner (R), the losing candidate for board chairman, asks the court to set aside the votes from the nine machines until a judge determines whether they were recorded properly.
Circuit Court Judge Dennis J. Smith agreed to hear the motion this morning.
The nine machines were located in the following precincts: Floris, Dulles, Kenmore, Freedom Hill, Kilmer, Waynewood, Reston 1, Rose Hill and Masonville, according to the lawsuit.
"It is our information that there are irregularities," said Christopher T. Craig, attorney for the Republicans. "Voting machines were moved out of polling places and back into the polling places, and they are not supposed to be. That is not supposed to happen."
Craig said election law prohibits the removal of machines in the middle of voting.
Luca said there were "unanticipated problems" with the nine machines. Election workers in the nine precincts tried to reboot the machines as trained, she said, but that did not solve the problem. She then decided it would be best to bring the machines to the county government center, where technicians were better prepared to deal with them.
"The whole idea behind these machines is that they are portable, so it made more sense to bring them to where you had the technology and the people to fix . . . these problems," Luca said.
Craig acknowledged that the number of votes, estimated in the hundreds, "may not make any difference, but that is not the point."
"It's about voter integrity," he said.
In Montgomery County elections in September 2002, electronic voting machines were blamed for confusion. Several polling places opened late because the equipment was not set up, and inaccurate results were posted on the county Web site while judges struggled through complicated forms and tabulations.
Published by
Washington Post |
California voting machine called into questionby Paul Festa, CNet News
Nov. 4, 2003
As voters in California go to the polls, the state is launching an investigation into alleged illegal tampering with electronic voting machines in a San Francisco Bay Area county.
The voting machine fracas involves Diebold Election Systems, a North Canton, Ohio-based company whose machines are in use by four of California's 58 counties — Alameda, Plumas, Riverside and Shasta — and will be used by three more next year: Kern, San Joaquin and Solano.
The Voting Systems Panel, an advisory committee to Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, was widely expected to certify Diebold's new model, the AccuVote-TSx, on Monday. The model currently in use by California counties and elsewhere is the AccuVote-TS, which at 50 pounds weighs about twice as much as the one under consideration and incurs additional transport and security costs as a result.
But at the meeting, a panel member raised allegations that Diebold had inserted software into Alameda's machines — software that the state had not certified. If true, that would violate California election law, according to the secretary of state.
"There were allegations that uncertified software may have been installed in California inappropriately, and we're looking into it," said Doug Snow, a spokesman for Shelley. "Our elections officials are examining this. In California, the law requires notification to the state when there are these software upgrades."
Diebold did not return calls seeking comment.
Controversy has crept up repeatedly on the company this year as the debate heightens over the security and reliability of touch-screen voting. The company boasts 33,000 machines in the United States.
In July, computer security experts from Johns Hopkins University and Rice University failed the company's machines on a security audit. The company has been pursuing legal action against two Swarthmore students, among other people, who have posted to the Web the company's internal e-mail correspondence, which also calls into question the quality of the company's product.
In addition, the company and its chief executive, Walden O'Dell, have come under fire for partisan donations and remarks. Diebold donated at least $195,000 to the Republican Party between 2000 and 2002, and O'Dell once pledged to "deliver" Ohio's electoral votes for President Bush.
Meanwhile, California counties are under the gun to modernize their voting equipment. Nine counties still use the type of punch card machines that proved notoriously inexact in the 2000 presidential election. The state will decertify those machines in March.
The panel voted to table certification of the new machines indefinitely, pending the investigation into the software upgrade in Alameda.
One person familiar with the panel's action pointed out that the software upgrade in question had already earned its federal certification, and called the issue more procedural than substantive.
But elections watchdogs called that a distinction without a difference.
"Even if the software in question did go through federal testing, that doesn't change the fact that Diebold violated the state's certification laws," said Kim Alexander, founder and president of the California Voter Foundation. "It's the law in California that any system used in an election has to be certified. And when it comes to certification, the procedures are substantive."
The Alameda County Registrar of Voters did not return calls seeking comment.
Published by
CNet News
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