| Date |
Problem Type |
State
|
Vendor
|
Description
|
| 11/8/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
AR |
ESS |
Benton County. Printers in the ES&S iVotronic jammed.
Story
|
| 11/8/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
AR |
ESS |
Clark County. Unity software compiling results from the ES&S iVotronics added in the test ballots. Same thing happened in the primary.
Story
Archive |
| 11/8/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
AR |
ESS |
Sharp County. Votes tabulated on the ES&S software showed up multiple times. Some iVotronics had paper jams, delaying voting. The program glitch was allowing votes from precincts which had been counted earlier to show up on the tally sheet multiple times, as the votes from each succeeding precinct were counted.
Story
Archive |
| 11/8/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
AR |
ESS |
Benton County. Possible computer error with ES&S iVotronics. McCarthy said some indicators from the election results Tuesday led him to wonder whether the summary reports from voting machines reflected actual vote totals. He said he did not want to elaborate on what those indicators were. A recount could affect every race, he said.
Story
Archive
11/09/06 update -- The problem may be corrupted result data.
Story
Archive
11/10/06 update -- ES&S tabulation software subtracted votes as new totals were added. "Each time the election workers submit new precincts, votes already recorded were lost." The corrected totals show a change in the outcomes of 8 races.
Story
Archive
11/11/06 update -- Questions remain as some towns report more votes than the entire population of the town. Others report unusually low turnout. The countywide turnout is reported at 83%, which many agree is not believable. McCarthy is working with ES&S to determine what has happened.
Story
Archive
Story2
Archive2
11/14/06 update. Third and final set of official totals are released.
Story
Archive
11/16/06 update. Two electronic files containing ballots [presumably memory cartridges] were found uncounted in a bag. Including them in the count changed the Lowell city clerk race into a tie.
Story
Archive
|
| 11/8/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
AR |
ESS |
Lawrence County. Undefined problems with the ES&S iVotronics forced some voters to use paper ballots.
Story
Archive |
| 11/10/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
AR |
ESS |
Carroll County. Officials had trouble merging totals from early voting, absentee ballots, and election day. ES&S technician didn't know how to help them.
Story
Archive |
| 11/11/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
AR |
ESS |
Poinsett County. Candidate for mayor of Waldenburg voted for himself on the iVotronic, but the tally shows he received no votes. Eight or nine other people said they also voted for him.
Story
Archive
Story2
Archive2 |
| 11/13/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
AR |
ESS |
Crawford County. iVotronic votes from one precinct weren't included in the initial tally.
Story
Archive |
| 11/27/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
AR |
ESS |
Cleburne County. Vote-switching. Voters' selections for Mayoral candidate Jackie McPherson were changed on the iVotronic screen to votes for incumbent Paul Muse. Testing confirmed the problem.
Story
Archive |
| 2/6/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
AR |
ESS |
Benton County. iVotronic e-voting machines failed to start up at several polling places. Voters used paper ballots. Many were working by 2 pm. At one precinct, the screen was still black.
Story
Archive
The county also had problems closing the machines at the end of day to extract results. And "Poor-quality paper rolls
and humidity caused machines to jam."
Story
Archive |
| 2/6/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
AR |
ESS |
Faulkner County. iVotronic e-voting machine printer fails. Conway's Lisa Burks had just cast her vote using the touch-screen machine, but when she reviewed the printout she saw "a short horizontal line and long vertical line. The machine, Burks said, picked the wrong voter to mess with. As the founder and former national coordinator of the National Coalition for Verified Voting, Burks said, she lobbied against the state's adoption of electronic voting machines."
Other troubles include a machine that would not start up.
Story
Archive |
| 2/10/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
AR |
ESS |
According the the Secretary of State's office, there were fewer problems than in previous elections. However, there were some printer malfunctions, some machines wouldn't start up, a power outage caused machines to shut down, one machine wasn't printing paper records properly.
Story
Archive |
| 5/21/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
AR |
ESS |
White County. When early voting data was uploaded from the iVotronic touch screen to the Unity election management system, the system doubled them. The problem was detected when one candidate noticed that the totals in his race were nearly double the total votes in a comparable contest. The county did a "recount" and found that totals were different in every contest. The results of one contest was overturned by the recount.
Story
Archive
A programming error with time settings caused a domino effect of further complications, names were left off ballots, and the machine that tabulates the absentee ballots malfunctioned just as the polls closed at 7:30 p.m. “I don't exactly what that problem is,” said Thomas, one of the election commissioners. “There is some kind of printer head or something that would not allow the ballots to be read.”
Story
Archive
The vendor's defense: ES&S said the problems were not related to hardware malfunction but were related to programming. “Our agreement with White County is limited to hardware,” ES&S spokeswoman Amanda Brown said. “It does not include support services or programming.”
Thorough explanation of the four problems
Archive
|
| 5/24/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
AR |
ESS |
Faulkner County. Votes cast in the Constable contest were reported for candidates in the District 45 contest. The commission feels confident, by looking at the end-of-day paper record, that the votes have now been reassigned correctly. Correcting the count changed the outcome of the Constable contest. The county uses iVotronic e-voting machines and a central count scanner.
Story
Archive
Update 5/29/08. The "voter-verifiable paper trail" did NOT match the electronic count. The District 45 race (the first race on the paper ballot - pdf) was missing from the screen ballots on the East Cadron B voting precinct. Paper ballots were provided for that race in that precinct prior to the election. But the machines recorded Constable votes for the District 45.
"We assumed, erroneously, that it would not record that race since it was not on the ballot," [Faulkner County Election Commissioner Bruce Haggard ] said, adding that the votes for the constable race were later found to have recorded accurately on the voter-verifiable paper trail and therefore would not have appeared erroneous to voters either.
Story
Archive
Story2 |
| 9/19/2006 |
Poor design |
AR |
ESS |
Sebastian County Clerk says the ES&S iVotronic machines, purported to be accessible to people with disabilities, aren't. The new electronic iVotronics voting machines supplied by Election Systems and Software are not user-friendly for the visually or hearing impaired, she said. During the primary election, she said, a visually impaired voter became frustrated when he had difficulty following the lengthy and complicated screen navigation instructions.
Story
Archive |
| 11/9/2006 |
Poor design |
AR |
ESS |
Faulkner County. Problems merging early voting totals with election day cause officials to call ES&S to walk them through the process. Initially, the early vote totals were added twice to the totals.
Story
Archive |
| 11/4/2008 |
Poor design |
AR |
ESS |
Clay County. iVotronic touch screen voting machines were not zeroed out after testing (which means they still retained test votes). In some locations, voting was delayed until the problem was fixed.
Story
Archive |
| 10/20/2004 |
Provisional ballots |
AR |
|
Pulaski County. Remote sites for early voting in Pulaski County do not have provisional ballots, so voters whose ballots are challenged have no way to vote.
Story |
| 10/26/2004 |
Registration errors |
AR |
|
Pulaski and Jefferson Counties. Over 500 complaints so far from voters who have been disenfranchised because they registered on the wrong forms.
Story |
| 2/7/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
AZ |
ESS |
Cochise County. As the county accumulated totals from the precincts, a computer error on kept adding the results for five polling places every time new figures were added. The error got worse when the cumulative error went through five updates. County officials noticed the problem when they realized the total number of ballots cast was reported to be more than the people registered in the county.
Story
Archive |
| 10/31/2004 |
Registration errors |
AZ |
|
Thousands of Arizonans who registered to vote over the Internet are missing from voting rolls in the state's 15 counties. County recorders have been instructed to make supplemental lists, issue certificates to the missing voters or simply send a list of the voters to each polling place so those people can vote.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Registration errors |
AZ |
|
Three problems cropped up in early reports from Arizona: (1) voters were told they had already requested an early ballot, but denied having done so, (2) voters were told their names did not appear on the voting roster, and (3) polling place consolidation caused confusion, lines, and delays.
Story
Archive |
| 2/7/2008 |
Registration errors |
AZ |
|
Pima County. "Complaints from people who showed up to vote only to find they weren't on the rolls were through the roof.
Nearly 12,000 voters out of roughly 130,000 voters in Pima County were issued provisional ballots. For perspective, in 2006, just 11,000 provisional ballots were issued when about 285,000 people voted." (That's 9.2% vs. 3.9% in 2006.)
Story
Archive |
| 9/9/2004 |
Voter intimidation |
AZ |
|
Pima County Voter Registrar Chris Roads said on the program that out-of-state students are committing a felony if they register to vote in Arizona and they don't intend on remaining in the state "indefinitely." Students consulted attorneys and held a press conference last week declaring that it was perfectly legal for out-of-state students to vote in Pima County as long as they've lived here 29 days. Even Pima County Recorder F. Ann Rodriguez backpedaled from Roads' statement in comments last week to the Arizona Daily Wildcat.
Story1
Archive1
Story2
Archive2 |
| 11/7/2006 |
Voter intimidation |
AZ |
|
Tuscon, Arizona, Hispanic voters intimidated with man carrying a gun, and others with video cameras.
Story
Story2 |
| 5/20/2009 |
Accessibility |
CA |
ESS |
Los Angeles County. Write-in votes cannot be cast on an InkaVote Plus "accessible" voting machine.
Story
|
| 10/12/2004 |
Ballot printing |
CA |
|
San Diego County. At least 8 voters have received incorrect absentee ballots because of the printing company's error. Story |
| 10/30/2004 |
Ballot printing |
CA |
|
San Diego. The first blunder occurred the first week of October, when the county had to send warning letters to 36,000 voters because of a mix-up with absentee ballots at a printing company in Fresno. Wrong ballots were stuffed in some of the ballot envelopes mailed to voters. So far, 65 voters have reported receiving the wrong ballots.
Story |
| 10/30/2004 |
Ballot printing |
CA |
|
San Diego. The method of determining if the absentee ballot is correct doesn't work. One voter reported, "One side was for San Diego, the other side was for Lemon Grove. The front of the ballot is correct. It's the back of the ballot that's wrong.
Story |
| 10/30/2004 |
Ballot printing |
CA |
|
Most absentee ballots had blacked-out portions on the back, the result of elections officials trying to correct a mistake without reprinting ballots.
Story
Archive |
| 10/20/2005 |
Ballot printing |
CA |
Sequoia |
Santa Clara County. Printing problems have delayed delivery of absentee ballots by a week. When the ballots arrived from the printer (Sequoia Voting Systems), there were problems with the bar coding that ensures only one ballot goes into each envelope, and with the scoring that ensures folds don't interfere with votes.
Story
Archive
|
| 10/21/2005 |
Ballot printing |
CA |
Sequoia |
Humboldt County. About 900 voters received incorrect ballots. The elections manager said the error was made by Sequoia Voting Systems. Sequoia Voting Systems is printing correct ballots, which should be in the mail by Saturday, McWilliams said.
Story
Archive |
| 10/26/2006 |
Ballot printing |
CA |
Sequoia |
Ventura County. Ojai Valley absentee ballots (printed and sent by Sequoia Voting Systems) are missing the contest for Casitas Municipal Water District. Instead they have the contest for Ventura County Board of Supervisors' Fourth District race — in Simi Valley. The mix-up also eliminated the Ojai Unified School District race from the ballot.
Story
Archive |
| 10/27/2006 |
Ballot printing |
CA |
Sequoia |
Ventura County. Sequoia printed absentee ballots wrong for another region in the county (as well as in Denver CO). "In the Conejo Valley, at least three voters in the past week said their cards did not show races for the Ventura County Community College District Area 2, Conejo Valley Unified School District and the Conejo Recreation and Park District, Browning said. Instead, they were asked to vote for candidates seeking spots on the Casitas Municipal Water District board, which serves the Ojai Valley. "
Story
Archive
|
| 11/7/2006 |
Ballot printing |
CA |
Sequoia |
Alameda County. Poll workers in an estimated 100 polling places or about one in eight had ballots jam in legions of new optical scanners supplied by Oakland-based Sequoia Voting Systems. The problem apparently was the ballot itself, printed by a private contractor, K&H Integrated Print Solutions, in Everett, Wash. The ballots featured a perforated strip at the top with a voter number that poll workers were to tear off and hand to the voter before inserting the rest of the ballot in the optical scanners. But the perforations were poor to non-existent, according to poll workers and county elections officials, leaving a ragged edge that jammed in the scanners.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Ballot printing |
CA |
Sequoia |
Riverside County. A printing error scored as many as 60,000 absentee ballots so deeply that they fell apart when voters removed them from envelopes. That problem was slowing a team of 16 election workers, who were painstakingly hand-copying the last of roughly 35,000 ballots onto intact ballot cards Monday night.
Story
Archive
Feb. 16, 2008. This follow-up article indicates about half the number of problem ballots. It says, "about 13,000 of the estimated 18,000 defective ballots handled by the registrar's office have already been duplicated for counting. Dunmore said the ballot vendor, K&H Printers of Washington, absorbed the cost to reprint and mail additional ballots."
Story
Archive
|
| 3/24/2008 |
Ballot printing |
CA |
ESS |
Sacramento County. ES&S miscalibrated the precinct optical scanners, and the tinting on the ballots was so dark that the scanners mis-read the votes. Ballots had to be taken back to the central office to be scanned.
"During its investigation, the county said that the vendor that supplies and maintains the scanners, Elections Systems & Software, conducted improper recalibration and preventive maintenance on the machines in December. In addition, the report said that ballots printed by Consolidated Printers were too dark to allow the ballot to be correctly read by the faulty scanners."
Story
Archive |
| 10/19/2006 |
Deceptive practices |
CA |
|
Orange County. GOP congressional candidate is alleged to have sent a letter threatening Hispanic immigrant voters with arrest. County GOP called for his withdrawal.
Story
Archive
|
| 10/13/2008 |
Deceptive practices |
CA |
|
Orange County. About 1,245 Orange County residents were erroneously mailed letters last week stating they were ineligible to vote in the upcoming election. The letter was intended to confirm their registrations, but a "computer glitch" inserted an additional sentence telling them they were ineligible to vote.
Story
Archive |
| 10/22/2004 |
Fraud |
CA |
|
Solano County. Hundreds of absentee ballots mailed on Oct 6. to Rio Vista residents have been "lost" in the mail. Story Archive |
