Officials solve election problem
Programming error won't return, they say
Sunday, November 12, 2006
BY AL WINN
Of Our Lebanon County Bureau

LEBANON - Lebanon County officials have a good idea what went wrong with their voting machines on Election Day, and it is not likely to happen again, they said.

Delays in opening the polls around the county led to a decision by county officials to extend the closing time from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m.

The problem was an incompatibility between two kinds of cartridges poll workers use to activate the electronic voting machines, election officials said.
 One cartridge is used to turn the machines on in the morning and read the results in the evening. Another cartridge is used by a poll worker to reset a machine for each new voter.

When voter registrar Elaine Ludwig and two technicians programmed the cartridges about two weeks before the election, they programmed the two differently, County Commission Chairman Bill Carpenter said.

As a result, when poll workers ed the cartridges, the machines rejected them, Carpenter said.

Ludwig and Carpenter said they understand the problem well enough so it won't happen in another election.

How long it took to solve the problem varied by polling place. Betty Eiceman said poll workers at the Lebanon municipal building got machines going almost immediately. In North Cornwall Twp., it took about 15 minutes, said Marc Hamme, a poll worker there.

At the Jackson Twp. building, voting machines were out of service much of the day, leaving voters in the county's largest voting district filling out paper ballots. In all, 496 votes were cast on machines and about 1,300 by paper ballot.

During the hour voting was extended, between 200 and 300 votes were cast, all by paper ballots.

AL WINN: 832-2090 or awinn@patriot-news.com