| Date |
Problem Type |
State
|
Vendor
|
Description
|
| 10/26/2004 |
Malfeasance |
CA |
|
Riverside County, Palm Desert. Contrary to instructions by the Secretary of State, the Registrar is not providing paper ballots as an alternative for voters who don't want to vote on the touch screens. Story Archive |
| 10/30/2004 |
Malfeasance |
CA |
|
Only two of the 10 touchscreen counties, Santa Clara and Plumas, plan to post signs letting voters know they can vote on paper. Even though the voters are properly registered, three counties Alameda, Merced and San Bernardino plan to treat the e-voting objectors' ballots in the same manner as if they weren't registered.
Story
Archive |
| 11/13/2004 |
Malfeasance |
CA |
|
Riverside County. After Secretary of State Kevin Shelley directed all touch screen counties to provide a paper ballot option, poll workers did not offer it and were resistant to providing it even to those who asked.
Story
Archive |
| 11/8/2005 |
Malfeasance |
CA |
|
San Bernadino. Poll worker failed to show up on time and voters had to wait two hours or leave and come back.
Story
Archive |
| 11/8/2005 |
Malfeasance |
CA |
|
San Joaquin County. One memory disk was lost, another couldn't be read by the computer. Fortunately, the optical scan ballots were available for re-scanning.
Story
Archive |
| 11/16/2006 |
Malfeasance |
CA |
|
Monterey County. In violation of a directive from the Secretary of State, poll workers were told by county officials not to offer paper ballots. Long lines caused many voters to leave without voting.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Malfeasance |
CA |
ESS |
Los Angeles. The electoral inspector at the Westside Jewish Community Center says he still has not received voting equipment, hours after polls opened. Bernie Cade says he has not received voting machines or the ink that goes in them for any of the seven booths in the polling station. Dozens of people were sent to other polling places nearby. Los Angeles County Registrar's office spokeswoman Grace Chavez says someone with the equipment should be on their way soon.
Story
Archive |
| 10/30/2004 |
Paper ballots (late) |
CA |
|
Nevada County. Numerous absentee ballots have gone missing in Nevada County recently. Clerk-Recorder Kathleen Smith insists ballots for previously registered absentee voters were mailed on Oct. 4 and should have been received by Oct. 8.
Story
Archive
|
| 11/1/2004 |
Paper ballots (late) |
CA |
|
Voters report that they haven't received their absentee ballots yet. Fresno (1,537 were reissued), Kings (68), Madera (395), and Tulare (300).
Story
Archive |
| 10/26/2006 |
Paper ballots (late) |
CA |
|
San Mateo County officials are two weeks late mailing absentee ballots.
Story |
| 11/3/2006 |
Paper ballots (late) |
CA |
Diebold |
San Diego. Additional ballots ordered from Diebold were late because of "problems with the printing press operation." 5,000 Xeroxed copies of the ballot were sent out instead. The staff will duplicate the returned ballots onto standard ballots.
Story
Archive |
| 10/28/2008 |
Paper ballots (late) |
CA |
|
Solano County. County election officials said they will be unable to meet the record demand for issuing early ballots through the mail to voters. Likely between 500 and 1,000 people won't be getting ballots sent to them despite making requests on their registration forms. "We were overwhelmed with the amount of voter registrations on Oct. 20, the final day to register," McWilliams said. "Over half wanted their ballot issued to them through the mail."
Story
Archive |
| 11/8/2005 |
Poor design |
CA |
|
Alameda County. Voters were concerned about the high number of votes already cast on the touch screen voting machines when they began to vote. Election officials said the number displayed shows the total number of votes ever cast on the machine. (Why is that number displayed for voters to see?)
Story
Archive
|
| 10/24/2006 |
Poor design |
CA |
Hart InterCivic |
San Mateo County. Trained personnel inputting votes on the eSlate voting machine made errors on ballots in 40% of the precincts in the first day of testing, even with a voter-verifiable paper audit trail. David Tom, county elections manager, said, "The equipment was new to them, so there was a higher number of errors than we would like." Voting advocates, however, said the high prevalence of errors in using the machines — which required the elections department to extend the number of test days from three to six — raises concerns about whether voters will be able to operate the eSlate machines, made by Hart InterCivic.
Story
Archive |
| 11/9/2006 |
Poor design |
CA |
Sequoia |
Riverside and San Bernadino Counties. Printer problems caused long lines and many voters left without voting. The culprit was the limits of the printer-verification system attached to Sequoia electronic voting machines, registrar officials said.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Poor design |
CA |
ESS |
Los Angeles. The Los Angeles system requires that decline-to-state voters not only ask specifically for a Democratic ballot - but also fill in a special bubble on the ballot indicating their desire to vote on the Democratic presidential ticket. Failure to fill in the bubble voids their presidential ballot. There are 776,000 "decline-to-state" voters in LA.
Story
Archive
Story2
Archive2
Election officials are concerned that "double bubble" ballot design flaw could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters.
Story
Archive
|
| 11/16/2004 |
Provisional ballots |
CA |
|
Alameda County. Students at Berkeley were given provisional ballots when they chose the option for paper mandated by the Secretary of State. In one precinct nearly half the ballots were provisional.
Story |
| 2/6/2008 |
Provisional ballots |
CA |
|
Santa Clara County. At least two precincts ran out of provisional ballots. "In 37 years of volunteering at polls, on-duty volunteer Betty Britton said she couldn't recall another year when provisional ballots ran out."
Story
Archive |
| 10/29/2004 |
Registration delays |
CA |
|
San Bernadino. Thousands of voters may be forced to cast provisional ballots when they go to the polls because the county registrar is overwhelmed with a flood of late registrations.
Story
Archive |
| 10/30/2004 |
Registration errors |
CA |
|
San Diego. People report they were listed as "inactive" voters when they actually have voted for years.
Story |
| 11/4/2009 |
Registration errors |
CA |
|
Merced County. Errors in the voting rosters caused some voters to be disenfranchised. The school board election may have to be reheld. One precinct was missing two pages of its roster of eligible voters.
Story
Archive |
| 11/3/2004 |
Too few ballots |
CA |
|
Nearly two dozen polling places in Sacramento County ran out of ballots.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Too few ballots |
CA |
|
Contra Costa, Alameda, and Santa Clara Counties. Eight precincts in Contra Costa ran short of Democratic ballots. Alameda also reported shortages and had to send hundreds more out to the precincts.
Story
Archive
Eventually fourteen precincts in four cities in Alameda County ran out of ballots and voters voted on photocopies.
Polling places across Santa Clara County ran short of Democratic primary ballots, forcing poll workers in some places to turn to Vietnamese and Chinese language ballots, sample ballots torn from election pamphlets and ultimately notebook paper.
Story
Archive
|
| 11/4/2008 |
Too few ballots |
CA |
|
Reported to VotersUnite: I arrived at my polling place in the Mission district of San Francisco at 9:45 a.m. on 11/4/2008 I was told that the machine that tally's the votes [Sequoia Insight optical scanner] was broken and that they were waiting for a new one to arrive. I was also told that I would be the last person who could vote at that time because they just ran out of ballots. The volunteers told me that they had called to request more ballots at 7:30 a.m., and had still not received any. They had to turn away at least 10 people in line behind me. |
| 11/24/2004 |
Vote suppression |
CA |
|
San Diego. A judge ruled to ignore the votes of thousands of voters who neglected to fill in a bubble beside their write-in vote for Donna Frye for mayor.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Vote suppression |
CA |
|
Contra Costa County and elsewhere. Independent voters showed up to the polls and poll workers told them erroneously that they could not get a nonpartisan ballot, a Democrat Party ballot or American Independent party ballot. One man e-mailed from El Granada to say he was given no choice in voting for president.
Story
Archive |
| 11/3/2009 |
Vote suppression |
CA |
|
Los Angeles County. Moses Awaad, owner of Finance Auto Sales, registered to serve as a polling place in July. But on election day, he refused to allow poll workers or voters into the building.
Story
Archive |
| 10/28/2004 |
Voter intimidation |
CA |
|
Napa County. Registrar John Tuteur has declared that people who don't want to use the e-voting machines will be asked to wait for everyone else in line at the time to cast their votes before they will be given a paper ballot. Story Archive |
| 11/7/2006 |
Wrong ballot |
CA |
ESS |
Contra Costa County. Voters were given ballots with the wrong contests. ES&S M100 Optical scanners failed to alert poll workers to the problem.
Story
Archive
|
| 4/28/2009 |
Wrong ballot |
CA |
|
Ventura County. At a polling place in Santa Paula, where grand jury members saw poll workers give some voters the wrong ballots, an error that “may have a had a material effect on the outcome” of the Santa Paula Elementary School District race, the grand jury said. Ofelia De La Torre wound up losing her seat on the board by a single vote.
Story
Archive |
| 11/9/2004 |
Ballot printing |
CO |
|
Boulder County. A printing error that distorted bar codes on Hart Intercivic paper ballots is being blamed for delays that made this one of the last counties in the nation to report election results. Scanners rejected ballots with the bad bar codes, requiring election judges to tally those votes race by race. Voting equipment was tested before the election. But the printing error occurred only on actual ballots that went to voters, not the test ballots.
Story1
Story2 Archive1 |
| 11/14/2004 |
Ballot printing |
CO |
|
Instructions on absentee ballots were wrong in several counties, including Denver and Adams.
Story
Archive |
| 10/19/2005 |
Ballot printing |
CO |
Sequoia |
Arapahoe County. Voters in at least four precincts were mistakenly sent duplicate ballots for the Nov. 1 election. The duplicate mailings are a result of an error on the part of Sequoia Voting Systems, a vendor that the county contracts with to print and mail out ballots.
Story |
| 11/1/2005 |
Ballot printing |
CO |
|
Boulder County - "The folds in the ballots in Boulder County may cause machines to miscount the votes in the critical statewide Referenda C & D issues."
Arapahoe County - some absentee voters didn't receive their ballots. County officials are investigating.
Story
Archive |
| 10/12/2006 |
Ballot printing |
CO |
Sequoia |
Denver. Sequoia Voting Systems, printed 44,000 absentee ballots with the "yes" and "no" boxes transposed on the measure for Referendum F, a measure that would change the way recall elections are handled. "Election officials said they had proofed the ballot, and the proof did not contain the error. Somehow, the proof was changed, said commission spokesman Alton Dillard."
Story
Archive
Oct. 27 - The solution. Duplication 30,000 ballots before scanning them. Sequoia, to blame for the error, won't be supplying additional machines to count the transposed yes/no ballots. "These are kind of large, expensive machines, and they don't just have a whole bunch of them sitting around,"
Story
Archive
Oct 28. A new decision. Officials decide the potential for human error in duplicating so many ballots is too high. They will program some of the ballot scanners to read the misprinted ballots.
Story |
| 10/12/2006 |
Ballot printing |
CO |
Sequoia |
Denver. Sequoia's second printing error was instructing voters to use 24 cents less postage than necessary to return the ballots.
Story
Archive |
| 11/14/2006 |
Ballot printing |
CO |
Sequoia |
Denver. Sequoia misprinted the barcodes that identify precincts on absentee ballots, so the county has to sort 70,000 ballots into the 23 different ballot styles. "Sequoia's vice president of communications, Michelle Shafer, did not return four calls and pages seeking comment."
Story
Archive |
| 10/18/2004 |
E-pollbook |
CO |
|
Adams County (Denver). Computers fail to connect to the main computer to verify voter registration. Story
Archive |
| 11/7/2006 |
E-pollbook |
CO |
Sequoia |
Denver. At the Convention Center, though 100 people stood in line, only 25 percent of the voting machines were in use at any given time, as poll workers tried to get verification of voter registration from computers that were frequently down. At Denver Botanic Gardens, more than 200 voters backed up in a line that stretched out of the gates and down the block more than half way to 11th Avenue. At Corona Presbyterian Church, voters were being told to expect about a two-hour wait as they snaked around the building. Many voters were unable to wait.
Story
Archive |
| 11/8/2006 |
E-pollbook |
CO |
Sequoia |
Denver. E-poll books failed, computers crashed and voting machines broke down across the city, causing long lines and waits up to three hours.
Story
Archive
Computer glitches prevented thousands of residents from voting, piles of absentee ballots are still to be counted, and Denver Auditor Dennis Gallagher today asked that Denver's two elected voting commissioners - Susan Roger and Sandy Adams - resign and that the mayor fire Clerk and Recorder Wayne Vaden as well as the entire senior staff of the election commission, including executive director John Gaydeski.
Story
Archive
11/16/06 update. It is revealed that "Denver election officials never tested the capacity of the troubled computer systems they used to verify voter registrations on Election Day - an omission one computer expert called "shocking" and others said seemed shortsighted."
Story
Archive |
