| Date |
Problem Type |
State
|
Vendor
|
Description
|
| 6/10/2009 |
Machine malfunction |
VA |
AVS |
Fairfax County. John McCann, 54, an attorney who is blind, said the audio technology malfunctioned on the machine he was using. Fairfax County uses the AVS WinVote paperless electronic voting machine, purported to be accessible.
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| 6/4/2009 |
Machine malfunction |
SD |
ESS |
Pennington County. The ES&S tabulation software added nearly 5,000 votes to the total as votes from the three M650 scanners were combined. When the problem was corrected, the total number of votes was cut nearly in half. With the correction also, a winner emerged in the Ward 4 Rapid City Council post, so no runoff is needed.
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| 6/3/2009 |
Machine malfunction |
NJ |
Sequoia |
Monmouth County. Results from a half-dozen towns were delayed because of problems in transmitting data from Sequoia Advantage electronic voting machine cartridges. In several cases after the polls closed Tuesday the cartridges had to be physically transported to central election offices in Freehold. "I'm not sure what the problem was, but the cartridges weren't being read correctly," Allentown Borough Clerk Julie Martin said.
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Update 6/5/09. The county is planning a special mock election in hopes of figuring out what keeps going wrong in reporting results from real elections.
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| 5/28/2009 |
Machine malfunction |
CO |
TrueBallot |
Aspen. In an Instant Runoff election (IRV), 28 votes were miscounted in the final round. Sixteen of the votes for Ireland (the winner) were counted for Marks, and 12 were deemed “exhausted” because they did not list rank Marks. The correction increased the margin of victory for Ireland.
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| 5/21/2009 |
Machine malfunction |
PA |
|
Bucks County. Problems reporting the results online. “For about an hour Tuesday night one of two servers the county rents through a subcontractor of King of Prussia-based Perfexion went down. Another client of the subcontractor may have left an application running that crowded the system, said chief information officer Don Jacobs.
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| 5/20/2009 |
Machine malfunction |
PA |
|
Bucks County. Shouptronic 1242 Voting machines malfunctioned in five towns: Bristol, Wrightstown, Falls, Tullytown and Morrisville. Paper write-in ballots were jammed in two machines, details about the others are unknown.
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| 5/2/2009 |
Machine malfunction |
IL |
Diebold |
St. Clair County. A "voting machine malfunction caused several hundred ballots to go uncounted" election night. When they were tallied, the results were reversed and the incumbent won the mayoral race. The article doesn't say if the voting machine malfunction was on the AccuVote optical scanner or the electronic voting machine.
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| 4/9/2009 |
Machine malfunction |
IL |
Diebold |
St Clair County. Ward 1 polling place in Whiteside School. The votes were uploaded from both the optical scanner and the TSx touch screen, but the computer didn't count the 407 ballots from the optical scanner.
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| 4/8/2009 |
Machine malfunction |
KS |
ESS |
Saline County. Vote-flipping on the iVotronic touch screen machine. "The problem was this: When a voter pressed a certain candidate's bar on the voting machine's screen, the candidate above the selected candidate instead received the checkmark."
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Update 4/10/09. The county has discovered that vote-flipping is a known problem that affects 22,619 ES&S iVotronic voting machines, whose screens were made by Bergquist Co. In October 2008, the Brennan Center warned the Secretaries of State in 16 states that the screens had "calibration drift." ES&S admits that calibration may not hold through the entire election day.
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| 4/7/2009 |
Machine malfunction |
WI |
Sequoia |
Fond du Lac County. A few places were unable to modem results to the central office, which County Clerk Lisa Freiberg said, "is basically the same story all the time." Also, on one AVC Edge touch screen machine, the screen wasn't working.
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| 3/11/2009 |
Machine malfunction |
VA |
AVS |
Fairfax County. One of two WINvote paperless electronic voting machines broke down in one polling place while officials were tallying the votes. The malfunction left the outcome of the hotly contested race too close to call. Elections officials halted their efforts, sealed the malfunctioning machine and said they would resume their efforts to count the remaining ballots today.
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Update: 3/18/09. At the Fairfax County canvass, observers learned that among other problems, when the polls opened, the voting machine showed that there were no votes recorded -- which was as it should be. However, of those "zero" votes, three were for Republican John Cook, two for Democratic Ilryong Moon, one for independent Carey C. Campbell and one for a write-in candidate. Despite the obvious problem that there were seven unexplained votes at the beginning of the day and a mismatch of hundreds of votes at the end of the day, the county Board of Elections certified the results.
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| 2/18/2009 |
Machine malfunction |
WI |
Diebold |
Walworth County. A problem with an optical scanner memory card caused a delay in election results reporting Tuesday night for the village of Darien. At the end of the day, another memory card problem prevented poll workers from sending in the results electronically.
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| 12/17/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
OH |
Diebold |
Montgomery County. Because of the five lost votes on a machine in Trotwood, the county did additional double-checking and found another problem. The voter-verifiable paper record, which scrolls inside a canister on the touch screen machine, is supposed to clearly indicate when a voter rejects the ballot before it is cast and makes corrections. But in three cases, that did not occur.
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VotersUnite followed up with election director Steve Harsman to ask how the flaw was discovered. Harsman said that each valid ballot is accompanied by a unique barcode on the paper record, but three records had no barcode. Checking against the totals, they discovered that those without a barcode had been rejected, but "reject" was not printed on the record as it should have been. |
| 12/12/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
OH |
Diebold |
Montgomery County. Officials discovered -- through a special hand audit they were conducting on order from Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner -- that tabulation software (GEMS) used with touch-screen voting machines in the presidential election failed to count five votes in the city of Trotwood. They discovered that although the five votes were recorded to a memory card inside the voting machine, the votes weren't counted by the tabulation software when the memory card was uploaded to the tabulation server.
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Update 12/17/2008. The county decided to do an expanded audit. Workers matched electronic results with the machines' paper record. In Trotwood the machine showed 43 people voted, and the paper record showed 48. When the card was put back into its original machine, it re-synced and showed the votes, a procedure that would never occur during a typical count. Diebold (Premier) has no explanation.
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| 12/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Diebold |
Humboldt County. The election management system (GEMS 1.18.19) deleted the vote data from the first precinct uploaded to the server -- a precinct with 197 ballots. Diebold (Premier) has known about this problem since 2004-- "sometimes when a deck is deleted from the machine due to normal complications, the software also deletes the Deck Zero, which in this case was the vote-by-mail ballots from Precinct 1E-45." The error was discovered by citizens checking the ballot totals through the "transparency project" instituted by Carolyn Crnich, the county Registrar.
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More details |
| 11/17/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
NC |
ESS |
Craven County. More problems emerge. The article says 342 ballots are missing from the No. 7 Township Fire and Rescue early voting site. A total of 7,575 authorizations to vote were identified but staff can find ballots, tapes, flash cards or personal electronic ballot records for only 7,233.
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Archive
Update 11/18/08. The missing ballots were found in a personal electronic ballot counter used to record first day of one-stop votes at No. & Township fire and Rescue in Grantham. The PEB was marked "spare" and overlooked originally.
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|
| 11/14/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
NC |
ESS |
Burke County. Paper jammed on the iVotronic touch screen machines.
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| 11/13/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
IA |
Diebold |
Blackhawk County. A hand recount showed seven less ballots than the optical scanner reported in the Waterloo precinct. In another precinct, 18 valid votes were found on the 19 ballot rejected by the scanner.
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| 11/13/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
NC |
ESS |
Craven County. A memory card error caused only part of the main one-stop (early voting) ballots to be uploaded from one site. Revised numbers raise the turnout from 60% to 65% and may change the outcome of a State Representative race. An error in the reporting software also incorrectly categorized some ballots as absentee. The county uses iVotronic touch screen machines and M100 scanners.
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Archive One of the machines at the Cove City early voting site had a dead battery, which officials originally thought was the cause of the misreporting.
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Update 11/14/08. Officials say that coding errors, made by ES&S and distributed by Print Elect, caused the software to read the data incorrectly. Four ballot styles reflecting the district in which voters of particular precinct could participate and the "Geo-codes" were not entered correctly and produced reporting problems.
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Archive |
| 11/11/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
DC |
Sequoia |
Ward 3 Council Member Mary Cheh's staff uncovered several missing or incomplete voting results from several precincts in last week's election, she said. Cheh is demanding an explanation from Sequoia Voting Systems.
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Update 11/12/08. Officials are concerned that irregularities may indicate larger problems in the District's election software. For example: In Single-Member-District 6B11, which houses the District of Columbia Jail, the final unofficial election results showed no precinct reporting and 5 undervotes.
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Archive
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| 11/10/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
NY |
Sequoia |
Essex County. County commissioner complains of the unreliability, printer problems, and 180 identified defects in the Image Cast scanners.
Story
Archive |
| 11/8/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
NC |
ESS |
Forsyth County. An error occurred while uploading data from Precincts 601 and 604, causing incomplete vote data to be included in the initial results. The article describe the error: "[Rob Coffman, Forsyth County's director of elections,] said that the two precincts did correctly record the votes cast for each candidate, but when the results were fed into a computer that tallies all the returns, a mistake caused the software to omit results for the 74th N.C. House District in those two precincts. That, in turn, caused the vote totals in some other races to be incorrect. The corrected totals for the two precincts will result in slight changes in the totals of a number of other political contests."
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| 11/6/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
IA |
Diebold |
Scott County. Two memory card failure delayed the tabulation of results. The memory cards held the results of 11,627 ballots cast in early voting. Election officials turned to printout tapes of the summary reports to be manually entered into the computer system, but the software required more detailed and time-consuming precinct-by-precinct information to be entered.
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Archive |
| 11/6/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
IN |
ESS |
Wayne County. When local officials tried to tally the vote they received a "system error" message. They stopped the count, secured the votes and then had to wait for an answer to the problem from company officials at Election Systems & Software, which provided the computer system for the local election. The call to officials in Omaha, Neb., took well over an hour.
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| 11/6/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
NC |
|
Buncombe County. An unknown computer malfunction delayed the posting of election results on the State web site. “My understanding is that it was some sort of communication with the state board of elections,” said Jones Byrd, chairman of the Buncombe board of elections.
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| 11/6/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
WA |
Sequoia |
Pierce County. When the office ran the new voting tabulation softwareTuesday night to count the ranked choice voting ballots, it was so slow that technicians had to add memory to the computer system.
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| 11/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Sequoia |
Santa Clara County. Fifty-seven of the county's 785 Sequoia touch screen Voting Systems machines failed on Election Day, resulting in hours long delays before replacements arrived. Loose printer connections, as well as dead batteries and broken screens, caused the failures. Computer scientist Noel Runyan — who is blind and advises California's secretary of state on voting access issues — managed to vote in San Jose, despite what he called virtually inaudible voice recordings of his candidate choices and an "angry squirrel sound" in the background.
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| 11/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
CO |
Hart InterCivic |
Boulder County. Ballots are scanned by a Kodak scanner and the images are read by the tabulation system. The system was misreading some ballots because of a vertical streak on the image. The county speculates that this streak was caused by dust on the ballots, possibly coming from the creases after the mail-in ballots were folded.
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Note: This problem also occurred in Yakima County, WA in 2004. Story
Update 9/19/2009. After further investigation, "County Clerk and Recorder Hillary Hall released a report Friday that said the problem was an incompatible device driver installed on scanning machines. The incompatible driver disrupted communications between the scanners and ballot-counting software from Hart InterCivic."
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| 11/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
FL |
Diebold |
Hillsborough County. Students at the University of South Florida were still in line to vote at 10:30 p.m., and elections officials said computer problems were causing delays. Among the problems: elections officials had to break up early voting results into smaller pieces to prevent crashing the computer system, and about 150 optical scanners had trouble transmitting results and had to be manually taken to the elections office.
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Archive
More problems with vote tabulation for 13 early voting machines and problems accessing votes at two outstanding precincts.
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Update 11/6/08. Tabulation is still not done. Elections workers began re-entering nearly 80,000 two-page ballots into the machines Thursday morning. Two state senators are calling on Governor Charlie Crist to get involved in Hillsborough County’s election. County Supervisor of Elections Johnson blames Premier, the company that makes the optical scan machines. But Premier is blaming the elections office for trying to upload too many votes at once, and for mixing early voting and Election Day ballots.
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| 11/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
FL |
Sequoia |
Palm Beach County. Problems with four memory cartridges from the optical scanners have prevented county election officials from posting complete unofficial results of Tuesday's race. While tests were still being done, Assistant County Administrator Brad Merriman said it is likely the ballots themselves will be run through tabulating machines later today. The bad cartridges represent thousands of votes.
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| 11/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
IN |
Diebold |
Tippecanoe County. One of the memory cards holding early votes from the touch screen machine did not upload properly.
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| 11/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
KS |
ESS |
Crawford County. A programming defect between the ballot cards (run through the M100) and the iVotronic electronic voting machines in three precincts at a Pittsburg ward may have switched the votes in certain local races.
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Update 11/7/08: The scanners were not programmed to handle the rotation of candidates on the ballots. The error affects four races; only the County Attorney's race is close.
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Update 11/9/08. Officials found another tabulation error. One of the backup scanners might not have read votes on the Arma sales tax question.
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Update 11/12/08. Only 14 votes separates the two candidates for the County Attorney's race. The county will hand recount that race on the nearly 16,000 ballots scanned by the M100 optical scanners.
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| 11/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
KY |
Danaher |
Madison County. A data disc containing votes from a Berea precinct voting machine (presumably the Shouptronic 1242) could not be read. The county uses two types of voting machines - the Shouptronic and the Hart InterCivic eSlate - and the program that combines the votes from them won't generate a total until all discs are read. So the county was unable to obtain any totals until the problem was resolved.
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| 11/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
NC |
ESS |
Rockingham County. The central tabulator failed to read the memory cards from the optical scanners at five of the six one-stop voting sites. The county uses M100 scanners.
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| 11/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
NC |
ESS |
Polk County. Results for the County Board of Elections flip flop twice as the county struggles with a malfunction in the computer reporting system. Rebooting seems to help, but then results flip again. Then winners are declared. County officials speculate that some of the precincts were counted twice by the software.
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| 11/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
NC |
ESS |
Craven County. Three technicians from Print Elect "jury-rigged an M-650 rapid counter with a paper clip to help speed up the absentee ballot counting process."
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| 11/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
OH |
Diebold |
Miami County. A memory card failed, halting the scanning of ballots and leaving the officials with 10 boxes of ballots that had to be rescanned. Extra scanners from Diebold/Premier had to be brought in to complete the tabulating.
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| 11/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
PA |
ESS |
Centre County. Officials said there was a difference in how one of the new Model 100 optical scanner machines counted the votes in the 26th precinct, as opposed to the actual number of ballots cast. Workers were counting the ballots by hand as of noon. Similar vote count problems with two other State College precincts were corrected early Wednesday.
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| 11/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
SC |
ESS |
Charleston County. Problems uploading data from the iVotronic touch screen machines caused officials to enter the data by hand into the central system.
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| 11/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
WV |
ESS |
Marion County. The system failed to read the Personal Electronic Ballot (PEB) cartridges holding the votes of 4,600 early voters. The ES&S technician on hand was unable to solve the problem. Eventually, the county officials managed to get the votes uploaded and tallied.
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More on 11/6/08.
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