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Election Problem Log - 2004 to 2009
Check out our other problem logs!
VotersUnite! began this problem log with the November 2004 election. It continued its compilation of problems reported in the media by adding news stories about subsequent elections, through 2009. See also: Failures by vendor and Failures by state.
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Date Problem Type State
Vendor
Description
9/16/2009 Machine malfunction NY ESS Albany County. During the "pilot" using uncertified equipment, ES&S DS-200 optical scanners jammed. It turned out to involve a glitch in the machine's software that was supposed to have been fixed already by the state and the machine's manufacturer. Story Archive
9/16/2009 Machine malfunction NY Sequoia Washington County. Sequoia/Dominion optical scanner jammed and delayed the posting of results. "They couldn’t get the paper out," Board of Elections Commissioner Donna English said of the machine malfunction. "That happens a lot of the time. The custodian got there and got it straightened out." Story Archive
11/3/2009 Machine malfunction NY Sequoia Oneida County. At the Vernon polling place, none of the three ImageCast optical scanners would operate. Story Archive
11/3/2009 Machine malfunction NY Sequoia Broome County. ImageCast ballot scanners sensed defects in the paper and rejected valid ballots. "And so because it picks up the defects, it doesn't pick up what people are voting for, and we have to void it and give them another paper," said Sweeney. Story Archive
11/3/2009 Machine malfunction NY ESS Erie County. Three DS200 ballot scanners jammed and had to be replaced. Story Archive
11/3/2009 Machine malfunction NY Sequoia St. Lawrence County. ImageCast ballot scanner malfunctions prevented the county from having election results by the end of election day. Story Archive
11/4/2009 Machine malfunction NY Sequoia Cayuga County. ImageCast ballot scanners crashed. Some rejected valid ballots that other machines accepted. Story Archive
11/4/2009 Machine malfunction NY Sequoia Fulton County. ImageCast ballot scanners were impounded after it was found they were not working properly. Story Archive
11/4/2009 Machine malfunction NY Sequoia Lewis County. ImageCast ballot scanners malfunctioned at two polling stations. Story Archive
11/4/2009 Machine malfunction NY Sequoia Steuben County. The ImageCast ballot scanner in the first ward malfunctioned. Totals may not be known for weeks. Story Archive
11/10/2009 Machine malfunction NY Sequoia Broome County. Hand counts revealed the ImageCast ballot scanners in five voting districts had miscounted votes. In some cases, the machines had rejected valid ballots. Story Archive Story2 Archive2
11/12/2009 Machine malfunction NY ESS Erie County. A ballot programming error on the ballot scanner caused votes to be counted incorrectly. Story Transcript, see page 14.
11/13/2009 Machine malfunction NY Sequoia Lewis, Seneca and Schuyler Counties. The ImageCast ballot scanners failed. According to Anna E. Svizzero, state elections operation director, the primary cause of voting machine failure was a memory issue related to the way ballots were programmed to record multiple votes for one office. Story Archive

Update Nov. 20, 2009. "The issue was a bug in the Dominion source code that caused the machine to hang while creating ballot images for certain vote combinations in multiple candidate elections." The bug was discovered during pre-election testing, and ballot configuration files were modified in some machines, freeing up enough memory to prevent the hang. But not all machines with the problem were identified, so the malfunction occurred on election day in those machines. Story

11/25/2009 Machine malfunction NY Sequoia St. Lawrence County. Phantom votes (more votes than voters) reported in six election districts in the NY-23 congressional contest. Story Archive
11/27/2009 Machine malfunction NY Sequoia St Lawrence County. ImageCast ballot scanners broke down in eight election districts. A comparison of details from the election suggests that the machines miscounted votes in others -- adding votes in some, missing votes in others. Story Archive
11/2/2004 Machine malfunction OH Cincinnati. Problems with punch card voting machines delayed the start of voting for up to an hour Tuesday morning at a suburban precinct. Voters were unable to slide their punch-card ballots all the way into any of the six voting machines that had ALL evidently been damaged in transit. Story Archive
11/2/2004 Machine malfunction OH Danaher In Columbus, Ohio, overcharged batteries on Danaher Controls ELECTronic 1242 systems kept machines from booting up properly at the beginning of the day. Story Archive
11/3/2004 Machine malfunction OH ESS Mahoning County. The glass on top of one ES&S iVotronic electronic screen was too far from the screen, making it difficult for people to use their fingers to cast ballots. A screen went blank on a Youngstown voter while he cast his ballot. Story Archive
11/3/2004 Machine malfunction OH ESS Mahoning County. 20 to 30 ES&S iVotronic machines that needed to be recalibrated during the voting process because some votes for a candidate were being counted for that candidate's opponent. Story Archive
11/3/2004 Machine malfunction OH ESS Mahoning County. About a dozen ES&S iVotronic machines needed to be reset because they essentially froze. Story Archive
11/3/2004 Machine malfunction OH Toledo. At the Birmingham polling site in East Toledo, the sole machine broke down around 7 a.m. An hour later, when Ohio House Rep. Peter Ujvagi tried to cast his ballot, the poll worker told him to place his ballot in a secure slot so that it could be scanned in later. Story Archive
11/3/2004 Machine malfunction OH Toledo. Throughout the city, polling places reported an assortment of problems, ranging from technical trouble with Lucas County's leased optical-scan voting machines to confusion about precinct boundaries and questions over provisional balloting. Story Archive
11/3/2004 Machine malfunction OH Lucas County Election Director Paula Hicks-Hudson said the Diebold optical scan machines jammed during testing last week. Story Archive
11/3/2004 Machine malfunction OH Lucas County (Toledo). Technical problems snarled the process throughout the day. Jammed or inoperable voting machines were reported throughout the city. Story Archive
11/3/2004 Machine malfunction OH Knox County. Due to an equipment malfunction the wait was at least 1 1/2 hours long. Story
11/4/2004 Machine malfunction OH Knox County. Kenyon College student Maggie Hill appeared on the "Today Show" Wednesday morning. She was one of hundreds of students and other Gambier residents who waited for up to 10 hours to cast their votes. Observers in the Gambier precinct said there were only two voting machines for 1,300 voters. Each machine, they said, is designed to handle 20 voters per hour. Story
11/5/2004 Machine malfunction OH Danaher Columbus. A Danaher ELECTronic 1242 computer error with a voting machine cartridge gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in a Gahanna precinct. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. A cartridge from one of three voting machines at the polling place generated a faulty number at a computerized reading station. Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections said the cartridge was retested Thursday and there were no problems. He couldn't explain why the computer reader malfunctioned. Story1 Story2Archive1
11/6/2004 Machine malfunction OH Mercer County. One voting machine showed that 289 people cast (punch card) ballots, but only 51 votes were recorded for president. The county's Web site appeared to show a similar conflict, reporting that 51,818 people cast ballots but 47,768 ballots were recorded in the presidential race, including 61 write-ins. It would appear that about 4,000 votes (nearly 7%) could be unaccounted for. Story Archive
11/9/2004 Machine malfunction OH Mahoning County. One precinct in Youngstown, Ohio, recorded a negative 25 million votes, which was discarded from official results. [ES&S iVotronic voting machines] Story Archive
11/16/2004 Machine malfunction OH ESS Sandusky County elections officials discovered some ballots in nine precincts were counted twice. [ES&S optical scan] The county doesn't yet know how it happened. Story Archive
11/8/2005 Machine malfunction OH Diebold Lucas County. Some voters left without voting when the new Diebold voting machines weren't up and running when the polls were supposed to open. Memory cards couldn't be found at one polling place; voting machines couldn't be found at another. Story
11/8/2005 Machine malfunction OH Diebold Stark County. Poll workers ran into problems setting up the Diebold voting machines. Some panicked when they attempted to assemble the machines and the machines didn't work properly. 42 workers ran to polling stations to help. Operations weren't fully running until mid-morning. Story Archive
11/8/2005 Machine malfunction OH Diebold Montgomery County. Ballot programming error. The wrong candidates were displayed on the touch screens (Diebold). Story Archive
11/8/2005 Machine malfunction OH Diebold Montgomery County. Diebold touch screens show "low paper error" in 30 to 40 precincts (explained as a result of jostling during transport). Some poll workers had trouble inserting memory cards into the machines, and in two precincts machines were taken out of service in the morning because of malfunctions. Story Archive
11/8/2005 Machine malfunction OH Diebold Wood County. New Diebold touch screen machines weren't up an running at many precincts when the polls opened. "But all precincts had at least one machine up by 6:40 a.m. and all machines in the majority of the county were available for voters by about 7:30 a.m." Story
11/8/2005 Machine malfunction OH Butler County. "In Butler County, the debut of touch-screen voting machines -- and some technical foul-ups associated with them -- caused at least six or seven polling places to open up to a half hour late on Tuesday, county elections officials said." Phone lines were jammed with requests for technical assistance. Story
11/8/2005 Machine malfunction OH Clermont County. "Voting glitches in Clermont County are causing delays in ballot tallying. Officials said perforations at the top of a new ballot design jammed the counters, and some ballots were not cut properly, so they had to be fed through the machines more than once. New software also gave out inaccurate reports and had to be corrected. Story Archive
11/8/2005 Machine malfunction OH Diebold Lucas County. "Technical issues," difficulties with the memory cards, and "problems with the new technology" (Diebold touch screens) were some of the causes of the "chaos" in the election. Chain of custody issues, too: "But the scene at midnight was one of chaos on the third floor, with the special red and green bags holding memory cartridges and printed tapes of votes lining the hallways, piled on the floor in the elections office, and dumped in a large cart sitting unattended near the elevators." Story Archive
11/8/2005 Machine malfunction OH Delays in many counties were attributed to machine problems and lack of training in the 44 counties that used new touch screens and optical scanners in this election. Story Archive
11/8/2005 Machine malfunction OH Diebold Medina County. The new Diebold touch screen system reported incomplete results as complete, because the computer program that made that determination was based on polling places, not on the number of precincts. David Baer, spokesman for Diebold Elections Systems, said that they can report results in a number of ways and that first-time users often find they need to tweak the reporting programs to get the kinds of reports they need. Story Archive
Records: 361-400 of 616
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