Human error to blame for wrong vote tally in South Texas
11/9/2006 12:38 PM
By: Associated Press

DALLAS Election officials say a programming error by a Nebraska-based company appears to be isolated to Hidalgo County in South Texas.

The county's top election official discovered the mistake when early voting results in U.S. House District 28 put long-shot Constitution Party candidate Ron Avery in the lead.

Democratic incumbent Henry Cuellar went on to win.

Elections administrator Teresa Navarro said the problem wasn't in the touch screen voting machines, nor the cartridges that record the totals but in the software program written to compile the totals.

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

Election Systems and Software provides voting equipment to 145 of the 254 counties in Texas.

Also, 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.

But County Clerk Joy Streater said her insistence on sticking with old equipment that used paper ballots was to blame.