| Date |
Problem Type |
State
|
Vendor
|
Description
|
| 11/3/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
IA |
ESS |
Greene and Harrison Counties reported malfunctions in their ES&S Model 115 ballot-counting machines that delayed counting. Harrison County got its machine fixed shortly after midnight and resumed counting.
Story
Archive |
| 11/7/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
IA |
ESS |
Butler County. ES&S M100 ballot scanners were reading straight-party votes incorrectly, activating the undervote warning wrongly. But officials said the votes were tabulated correctly. The ballot programming error was made in-house.
Story
Archive |
| 11/7/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
IA |
ESS |
Fayette County. iVotronics freeze when the PEB is inserted too quickly. “That’s just a common problem,” Auditor Larry Popenhagen said. “They just have to be careful to do it when they’re supposed to.”
Story
Archive |
| 11/7/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
IA |
Diebold |
Pocahontas County. Printers on the Diebold TSx touch screens weren't printing the zero tapes at the start of the day to show that no votes had yet been cast.
Story
Archive |
| 11/8/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
IA |
ESS |
Pottawattamie County. Software programming error on the ES&S tabulator delayed counting.
Story
Archive |
| 11/8/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
IA |
ESS |
Calhoun County. ES&S M100 scanners locked up and had to be reset by election officials.
Story
Archive |
| 8/11/2007 |
Machine malfunction |
IA |
Diebold |
In the Iowa Straw Poll, "About 1,500 ballots needed to be recounted, said Mary Tiffany, a spokeswoman for Republican Party of Iowa.
"Two machines caused the problem, said State Auditor David Vaudt. “What likely happened is someone submitted their ballot too quickly after the other,” he said. The ballots from those machines were hand counted, then re-fed into the system to recalculate the vote. A campaign poll-watcher said in one instance, a black box contained 500 paper ballots but the machine’s memory said it had scanned in 498."
Story
|
| 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.
Story
Archive |
| 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.
Story
Archive |
| 10/31/2004 |
Malfeasance |
IA |
|
State officials said Story County Auditor Mary Mosiman violated voting regulations when she directed poll workers to turn away people in line at closing time. Story
Archive |
| 11/8/2007 |
Poor design |
IA |
ESS |
Johnson County. An error in the tally procedure flipped the results on an ordinance that would keep children out of bars after 10pm. Because the error caused a last-minute surge in "no" votes, the error was caught and corrected.
Story
Archive |
| 10/13/2004 |
Registration fraud |
IA |
|
Voters who, legitimately, included their Social Security number as the ID on their form have had their registration rejected because the state connection to the Social Security database isn't working yet and the auditors can't verify the ID information.
Story |
| 10/31/2004 |
Vote suppression |
IA |
|
Story County Auditor Mary Mosiman decided not to open another satellite voting station Monday, even though Secretary of State Chet Culver had said she would after some students complained they were turned away from a site at ISU's Parks Library on Oct. 21.
Story
Archive |
| 11/2/2004 |
Voter challenges |
IA |
|
Linn County. GOP poll watcher "was trying to challenge people for legitimately changing their address," said County Auditor Linda Langenberg.
Story
Archive |
| 11/4/2008 |
Voter challenges |
IA |
|
Poweshiek County. Republican Party leaders want election officials to toss the votes of 50 Grinnell College students who listed the general campus address on their absentee ballots instead of their own campus addresses. Diana Dawley, the Poweshiek County auditor, said Grinnell College students have listed the general campus address in the past without setting off any red flags. A hearing is scheduled for Thursday.
Story
Archive |
| 11/6/2008 |
Wrong ballot |
IA |
|
Woodbury County. Absentee ballots were sent to voters with the wrong Iowa House district listed. Election officials took the ballots from their envelopes and counted all the results except for the erroneous House race.
Story
Archive |
| 11/11/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
ID |
ESS |
Bannock County. M100s couldn't read ballots. "voting machine malfunctions caused serious election night complications." Scanners failed to recognize the ink recommended by the manufacturer. One scanner broke down.
Story
Story2
Archive2 |
| 11/7/2006 |
Accessibility problems |
IL |
Sequoia |
Cook County. Voter with visual impairments was given a paper ballot, no option to vote on accessible machine.
Story
Archive |
| 10/22/2004 |
Ballot printing |
IL |
|
DuPage County. A sample ballot printed in 43 newspapers misplaced a Democratic candidate and instructed voters to choose two candidates where only one will be elected. County officials say the actual ballots will be correct, even though the legal notice is incorrect. Story Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Deceptive practices |
IL |
|
Chicago. City election board spokesman James Allen said that some poll workers told incredulous voters—including one spouse of an election judge—that the stylus used for touch-screen voting was actually an inkless pen to fill out paper ballots. Naturally, the scanner rejected the ballots, but the poll workers overrode the scanner and recorded the blank ballots. By 3 p.m., only five of the 20 voters had been contacted to return to recast their votes.
Story
Archive |
| 2/5/2008 |
Deceptive practices |
IL |
|
Chicago, Cook County, Kane County, DuPage County, Jackson County. Suppression of Green Party voters.
Voters attempting to vote in the Green Party primary encountered suppression and intimidation. Poll workers claimed there was no Green Party ballot; claimed there was no GP primary because the candidates had all dropped out; and tried to give the voters Democratic ballots (with a green tag). Some polling places had only a few GP ballots; others had them wrapped up and out of site. Judges behaved rudely, intimidating other Green Party voters at some sites. At others, voters were only offered touch-screen ballots, not paper ballots. With persistence, some of the voters were able to vote in the GP primary. Others, who were less persistent, were disenfranchised.
Story
Archive
|
| 5/18/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
IL |
Diebold |
DuPage County. Upload of the York 58 precinct memory card failed, but the GEMS server showed the upload was successful. The failure was not detected until the next day when reports were run and zero votes were reported for each race in the precinct.
PDF (2 Mb), see page 3. |
| 11/2/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
IL |
|
Illinois State University. Almost 2,000 on-campus students braved long lines and three-hour waits to cast ballots at the Bone Student Center. As the line of students stretched past 500, many were late or missed class while waiting to vote.
Story |
| 11/2/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
IL |
Sequoia |
Chicago and Cook County. Vote-switching on the Sequoia touch screen. "Corrine Stoker pushed the button for one candidate, but her voting machine showed she voted for the opponent." Problems like Stoker's are "extremely rare," officials said, but can happen with electronic machines.
Story
Archive
Vote for Democratic gubernatorial candidate switches to Republican candidate.
"Alignment keeps going out. Voters complain," a poll worker complaint filed Friday said. "They recalibrate. A couple voters later, they complain. They recalibrate. They complain, etc. For two days straight."
Story
Archive |
| 11/2/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
IL |
Sequoia |
Chicago and Cook County. More Sequoia touch screen malfunctions. Trouble reports filed by voters and polling-place workers during early voting show glitches ranging from broken equipment to calibration issues with touch screens. "Screen goes black, beeps," reads one form. "Card will not lock into the unit," reads another.
Story
Archive |
| 11/7/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
IL |
Sequoia |
Cook County. Sequoia touch screens have failed, and many precincts have run out of pens used to mark the paper ballots. By 1:40 pm, the election office had received over 100 complaints.
Story
Archive |
| 11/7/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
IL |
Sequoia |
Cook County. Reports from voters. Vote-switching on Sequoia touch screens AND the paper print of the votes. Problems ejecting the voter access card. On demand printers not working - voter couldn't vote. Polling places late opening. Voter access cards not accepted by the machines. Voter given incorrect e-ballot. Printer jams. Touch screen machines broken down. Voter card stuck in the machine.
Story
Archive |
| 11/8/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
IL |
Sequoia |
Cook County. Serious data transmission problems slow the vote tabulation. David Orr is investigating whether it is Sequoia software, hardware, or both.
Story
Archive |
| 1/9/2007 |
Machine malfunction |
IL |
Sequoia |
Cook County. An investigative panel has found that " 'technology failures in multiple areas' and a lack of testing triggered a spiraling series of glitches that left some results unclear for days. "Although technology problems occurring on Election Night constituted the primary cause of the reporting delays, operational shortcomings in the process leading up to Election Day also played a role in failing to understand and thus mitigate the risks," the report said.
"The flawed user interface on the HAAT [machine designed to transmit vote totals from precincts to central office] led 90 percent of election judges to believe that they had successfully transmitted, whereas only 56 percent had actually done so," the report said.
Story
Archive
|
| 2/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
IL |
Sequoia |
Chicago and Cook County. Voting was delayed at a number of Chicago polling places, and voters were turned away for many and varied reasons: touch screen voting not working; equipment delivered to the wrong location; a security found unconscious inside; voters locked out "for security reasons"; pollworkers not showing up; doors unlabeled and locked.
Several of the delays were at least one or two hours, some prompting orders to keep locations open later in the evening.
"Nonetheless, Chicago election officials claimed a "hugely successful" start, saying that only 9 of 2,579 precincts failed to open on time, and those by only 10 or 15 minutes."
Story
Archive |
| 2/6/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
IL |
Sequoia |
Cook County. Election returns from the first precinct of the Second Ward in Evanston were missing 247 of its 540 ballots, said poll watcher Shannon Seiberling. The polling place uses a mix of optical-scan and computerized voting systems. Seiberling said the error probably occurred while poll workers were compiling the digital results from the four touch-screen voting machines at the polling place, when the scanner was supposed to add its total automatically. The number of missing votes equals the number of paper ballots that were scanned, though, according to the article, there is no way to determine whether this is what caused the discrepancy.
Story
Archive
Story2
Archive2
|
| 2/7/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
IL |
ESS |
Lake County. An as-yet unidentified machine malfunction prevented M100 optical scan vote-tabulation machines at polling places across the county Tuesday night from connecting to the county's computers in Waukegan through the phone lines. (An independent consultant has been employed to investigate.) The county clerk's office successfully relied on a backup plan - driving the machines to the nearest transfer station - to get votes from 161 polling places to the county government center.
Story
Archive |
| 3/8/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
IL |
Diebold |
DuPage County. In at least three precincts, the touchscreen machines flashed the word "Republican" at the start of the ballot in a two-party contest for Congressional District 14. The solution? Put a piece of masking tape over the screen where it appears.
Story
Archive |
| 11/4/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
IL |
Sequoia |
Reported to VotersUnite -- vote-flipping on the Edge touch screen machine: I was at my polling place in Chicago, St. Ignatias Church on Glenwood Avenue. The worker informed me that when people voted on the machine at the start of the day, the voting machine malfunctioned. When someone pressed Obama, the machine recorded they actually voted for McCain. This was reported to City Hall; the machine was shut down and paper ballots are not being used. |
| 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.
Story
Archive |
| 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.
Story
Archive |
| 1/24/2008 |
Paper ballots (late) |
IL |
ESS |
At least six counties - Kendall, Hancock, JoDaviess, LaSalle, Wabash and Woodford - have had significant delays in receiving their ballots for the election that is less than two weeks away. Some received their ballots this week, while a couple are still waiting. ES&S spokeswoman Amanda Brown said the company has no specific reason why some counties got their ballots late.
Story
Archive
This is one more in a long list of ES&S failures to deliver on its contractual obligations. |
| 11/4/2008 |
Paper ballots (late) |
IL |
|
Reported to 1-866-OURVOTE: Absentee voters still haven't received absentee ballots.
Story |
| 5/18/2004 |
Poor design |
IL |
Diebold |
DuPage County. The GEMS upload log was accidentally cleared during the memory card upload. The "Clear" and "Close" buttons are next to each other, and it's easy to clear when attempting to close. "When the clear button is selected, the user interface does not generate a confirmation popup asking the user 'are you sure?'."
PDF (2 Mb), see page 3. |
| 11/7/2006 |
Registration errors |
IL |
|
Cook County. Registration rolls incorrectly showed two voters had already voted. Another had registered when he renewed his driver's license and was not on the rolls, could not vote.
Story
Archive |
