Programming error miscounts votes in south Texas
Election official catches electronic voting maching problem
Houston Chronicle  By JEFF CARLTON, AP  08 November 2006

DALLAS — A programming error by a widely used Nebraska-based election system company Tuesday appears to be isolated to Hidalgo County in South Texas, election officials said.

The county's top election official discovered the mistake when early voting results in House District 28 put long-shot Constitution Party candidate Ron Avery ahead of popular Democratic incumbent Henry Cuellar by almost 2,000 votes with roughly 2,200 tabulated.

"We knew there was no way that could be correct," said Teresa Navarro, Hidalgo County elections administrator.

The problem was not in the touch screen voting machines, nor the cartridges that record the totals, but in the specific software program written to compile the totals, Navarro said.

The machines and cartridges correctly recorded votes and election officials were able to manually add votes based on the totals from each of the county's 500 voting machines.

"It was a coding-slash-programming error," Navarro said. "I can tell you the programmer is devastated."

Election Systems and Software, which employs the programmer, provides voting equipment to 145 of the 254 counties in Texas, according to the secretary of state.

Nationwide, the company provides voting equipment to about 1,800 jurisdictions in 43 states, spokesman Ken Fields said. An estimated 67 million voters used the company's equipment in the general election.

The incident was not serious enough for Texas officials to consider decertifying the company, said Scott Haywood, a spokesman for the secretary of state.

"I think the situation was dealt with appropriately and handled well once the problem was realized," Haywood said. "Here in Texas, voters can feel confident that their votes were counted in the way that they cast them."

Election Systems and Software provides the equipment in another Texas county where problems were reported Tuesday.

In Comal County, the software used in 12-year-old optical scanner machines did not "play nice" with the software in new touch-screen machines when officials tried to mesh the vote totals together. But County Clerk Joy Streater said her insistence on sticking with old equipment that used paper ballots was to blame.

"It was nothing they did," Streater said of Election Systems and Software.