Election officials try to work out bugs
 
 
 
 
By: Beth Gallaspy, The Enterprise 03/15/2006 
 
 
 BEAUMONT - Election officials in Jefferson County and with Election Systems & Software, the company that sold the county its new electronic voting system, are hoping to make changes to prevent future problems like the one that prompted a Monday recount.

Jefferson County was not alone in its election glitches as counties around the state moved to new systems to comply with federal law.

However, Scott Haywood, spokesman for the Texas Secretary of State's office, said the number of problems was comparatively small considering that the state had more than 500 elections March 7, a Democratic and a Republican primary in each of the state's 254 counties.

"There were only a handful of counties where we saw any problems occur and most of those involved tabulation of vote totals," Haywood said by telephone. "We are working with the counties and the vendors to ensure that we do increase training and increase communication to try to prevent this from happening in the future."

Jefferson County Clerk Carolyn Guidry said Tuesday that the county has made demands for changes from ES&S and is waiting to hear what the company will provide. Until then, the county will wait to pay the $1.9 million bill for the new system, Guidry said. A $2 million federal grant will cover the cost.

Jefferson County's problem arose with the tabulation of Election Day votes cast on touch-screen machines. On election night, tabulation equipment read data from 66 percent of Election Day personal electronic ballots, which store all results for a precinct, then flashed error messages when workers tried to count additional ballots, Guidry said.

Following instructions from ES&S employees on site, county workers tried to clear the votes from tabulation equipment and start over. However, the tabulation equipment apparently stored some of the previously counted votes and added them to the total, Guidry said.

The problem was discovered Friday during a routine manual count of three precincts chosen by the Secretary of State's office because the tallies from two precincts were higher than the actual number of votes cast.

Guidry said Monday after the recount that the problem was human error, not an equipment problem, caused by ES&S personnel who did not know how to erase data from the tabulation equipment.

"The support that we requested and that we paid for through ES&S was not there," Guidry said. "...He should have known if that data was stored somewhere else in that machine."

ES&S agreed to absorb the estimated $8,000 cost of the recount.

Jill Friedman, ES&S spokeswoman, objected to the characterization of ES&S personnel as incompetent.

"We do have a lot of confidence in our staff. In the implementation of a new system there are always some challenges," Friedman said by telephone. "In this case, there were likely things that could have been done differently or better, certainly on the part of ES&S and potentially all the way around."

Friedman said the company has accepted its responsibility and "assured the county that there would be some additional training and technical support leading up to this next election and also the rest of the elections for the remainder of the year."

ES&S also has been blamed for election problems in Webb County. Webb County Commissioners Court blasted the company Monday for programming errors and lack of training of county staff, the Laredo Morning Times reported.

Webb County votes had to be tabulated using flash cards from each electronic voting machine rather than personal electronic ballots, which store all results for a precinct, due to a programming error, according to the Laredo newspaper.

Tarrant County, which uses a system made by Hart InterCivic, also had problems last week. According to the Star-Telegram, a computer programming error caused some votes to be counted multiple times in both parties' primaries. The final tally was about 100,000 too high, the newspaper reported. Tarrant County officials handled computer programming under the direction of Hart InterCivic, the Star-Telegram reported.

In Jefferson County, voters also had the option of marking a paper ballot and feeding it into a scanner, which recorded the votes. Problems have not been reported with that system, also manufactured by ES&S, but those Election Day results also were recounted Monday.

Early votes were not recounted. Guidry said the tally matched the number of voters for early voting.

No one had requested a recount of early votes as of Tuesday, Guidry said. A request would have to be made by Thursday, when results are due to be canvassed by party chairs, Guidry said.

Even after the recount, the number of ballots was 368 higher than the number primary voters shown in voter registration records. Guidry attributed that to human error in not marking voters on the voter registration list.