| Date |
Problem Type |
State
|
Vendor
|
Description
|
| 11/5/2004 |
Late counting |
CA |
|
Santa Clara County. About one-third of the ballots remain to be counted because of the high numbers of absentee ballots, paper ballots requested by voters at the polls, and provisional ballots
Story |
| 11/17/2006 |
Late counting |
CA |
Sequoia |
Riverside County. 100,000 absentee ballots remain uncounted 10 days after the election. The election office says they have never before received so many absentee ballots.
Story |
| 11/2/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Hart InterCivic |
Orange County. Neal Kelley, chief deputy registrar said that during the first half of the day they had handled only sporadic glitches.
Story
Archive |
| 11/3/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
|
Sacramento. Sacramento officials said they had sporadic trouble with the new scanning machines being used for the first time. By late Tuesday, nine of the 712 machines used countywide had to be replaced because they didn't work. One didn't have a power cord. Others had minor glitches.
Story
Archive |
| 11/5/2004 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
ESS |
San Francisco. Troubles began on Wednesday after the election when the ES&S software failed to accurately count votes in the city's new ranked-choice voting system, which eliminates the need for expensive runoff elections. the problem stemmed from a safeguard in the software that converts optical scans of ballot results into data that the computer system uses to calculate winners. The conversion software shutdown when the amount of data entering the system had reached a level set by the vendor. (This sounds similar to the Election Management Systems' 32,767 vote limit encountered in NC, and FL.)
Story
Archive |
| 11/8/2005 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Sequoia |
Riverside County. Voters said the machine would not allow them to vote for only one candidate. They tried on three machines and finally used paper ballots. One of the machines was taken out of service.
Story
Archive |
| 11/8/2005 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
|
Alameda County. Touch screen voting machines switched votes on statewide propositions.
Story
Archive |
| 11/8/2005 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
|
Contra Costa County. "A series of glitches in new voting machines and ballot-counting machines further postponed results from Contra Costa County, said county elections clerk Stephen Weir."
Story |
| 11/8/2005 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
|
Monterey County. Ballot- counting machines "inexplicably overcounted the absentee ballots."
Story |
| 11/7/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Hart InterCivic |
Orange County. eSlate voting machines in over 30 heavily Democratic precincts are not working and at most of these locations there are no paper ballots available as backups.
Story
|
| 11/7/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
ESS |
Contra Costa County. Six ES&S M100 ballot scanners at various polling locations weren't reading ballots. Ballots were placed in a box to be scanned later.
Story
Archive |
| 11/7/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Diebold |
San Diego County. Diebold e-voting machine malfunctions were reported in many polling places across the county, mainly in the early hours after the polls opened at 7 a.m.
Story
Archive |
| 11/7/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
ESS |
Los Angeles County. ES&S InkaVote machines malfunction, didn't provide the overvote/blank ballot warning, in "only a couple of hundred" polling places out of 5,028.
Story
Archive |
| 11/7/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Sequoia |
Alameda County. Nearly 100 of the more than 800 Sequoia Insight ballot scanners at polling sites jammed.
Story
Archive |
| 11/7/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
ESS |
Contra Costa County. ES&S M100 scanners malfunctioned. Some jammed when reading the 19-in long ballot. Others had electrical failures that disabled the visual display.
Story
Archive |
| 11/8/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Diebold |
San Diego County. Paper jams on the Diebold touch screen machines in Vista.
Story |
| 11/8/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
|
Across the state: "Voters ran into a veritable zoo of problems at polls across California, from power outages to jammed ballot scanners to electronic voting machines designed for access to disabled voters that either wouldn't work or weren't handicapped accessible. Problems with touch screens and electronic ballot marking devices were reported in San Joaquin, San Diego, San Bernardino, Orange, Sacramento and Contra Costa counties, representing the products of every major voting machine vendor."
Story
Archive
|
| 11/8/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Diebold |
San Joachin County. Diebold touch screens malfunctioned and polling places ran out of English ballots.
Story
Archive |
| 11/8/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Sequoia |
Santa Clara County. Five Sequoia Edge touch screens broke down.
Story
Archive
Personnel Experience
|
| 11/8/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Diebold |
Marin County - San Francisco. Scanners wouldn't accept the first page of the ballot.
Story
Archive
|
| 11/10/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Sequoia |
Tehama County. A computer malfunction incorrectly labeled 500 paper polling-place ballots as absentee ballots. The Sequoia representative didn't know the cause of the problem. Assistant Clerk and Recorder Bev Ross said she was told machines had been incorrectly set to receive information for the wrong type of machine, although she wasn't certain of the cause Thursday.
Story
Archive
|
| 11/10/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Diebold |
Mendocino County. Diebold memory cards were corrupted, losing votes counted on optical scanners. Ballots will be recounted in the canvass process. Story Archive |
| 11/29/2006 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Sequoia |
Riverside County. Sequoia Edge voting machines weren't working. No paper ballots for voters, so some voters used ballots for another precinct and modified them. Long lines, and machines ran out of paper. Some machines were delivered but never became operable for the election.
Story
Archive |
| 3/8/2007 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Diebold |
Kern County - McFarland. City residents voted on Tuesday for mayor and two city council members, but still no one has been elected. The results are in, but multiple counts have produced different results. City officials said they do not know when those issues will be cleared up.
Story
Archive |
| 1/23/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
ESS |
Sacramento County. M100 optical scanners malfunctioned in many ways during the pre-election "logic and accuracy" tests.
"With some machines, the ballot could not be loaded at all, or only accepted if loaded in backwards. In some cases, Democratic votes were not being recorded by a scanner. With other machines, it would be Republican votes that were not recorded. And with some machines, there were no problems at all. With the election within two weeks, [County Registrar of Voters Jill] Lavine decided to forego using the scanners altogether, and count the ballots centrally at the county election office. "
Story
|
| 2/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Sequoia |
San Francisco. The Sequoia touchscreen froze while a voter was attempting to vote. After he inserted the plastic activation card into the machine, "Nothing moved--neither touching nor talking to the machine worked. What's worse, the card was now stuck in the machine as there was no eject button or function. The clerk who handed me the card was confounded. ... [After consulting another clerk,] the clerk then proceeded to lift the back of my voting machine up, slapping it hard so that it must have told it to reboot itself. ... After the two-minute reboot, voting was simple."
Story
Archive |
| 2/6/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Sequoia |
Santa Clara County. More than a dozen people trying to vote in the Democratic primary at one polling station were almost turned away without casting ballots after paper ballots ran out and the only electronic voting machine at the polling place malfunctioned. An independent election observer and a software engineer waiting to vote fixed the touch-screen machine for the 13 people waiting to cast their ballots. (The machine had been decertified by the Secretary of State for all but voters with disabilities.)
Story
Archive
Story2
Archive2 |
| 2/6/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Diebold |
San Luis Obispo County. Elections officials reported a handful of glitches at polling places in Nipomo, Arroyo Grande, Creston, Atascadero, and Paso Robles. County Clerk-Recorder Julie Rodewald said possible faulty memory cards forced staffers to remove six of the county’s 78 voting machines early Tuesday.
Story
Archive |
| 2/6/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Sequoia |
Riverside County. At times, one or two of the six ballot-counting machines in the Moreno Valley office broke down. At most times, one could not operate, delaying the final results. On average, officials were able to count about 15,000 ballots an hour. "The machines were expected to count about 400 ballots a minute. Since the polls closed at 8 p.m. Tuesday, they've averaged about 36 per minute."
Story
Archive
Story2
Archive2 |
| 2/7/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Sequoia |
Santa Cruz County. Unidentified "bugs" in the Sequoia system caused counting delays. "Gail Pellerin, the county clerk and elections head, traced the delays to two hardware problems with Sequoia Voting Systems equipment that took time to recognize and address."
Story
Archive |
| 2/12/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
ESS |
Los Angeles County. Poll worker/journalist reports that they couldn't get the InkaVote machines working for the first few hours, and the multilingual machine never worked at all.
Story
Archive |
| 3/24/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
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 |
| 6/4/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
ESS |
Los Angeles County. Four of twelve votes (33% error rate) were printed on the ballot incorrectly by the InkaVote Plus ballot-marking device, intended for use by people who are blind. In addition, the other InkaVote Plus at the polling place was not working, and one of the scanners was inoperable all day. Neither machine was replaced or repaired.
Story1
Story2
|
| 6/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Sequoia |
San Bernadino County. The vote-counting software in the central tabulator counts precincts incorrectly. Sequoia has known about the defect for at least a year, but has not yet corrected it. Riverside County's registrar also has known about the problem and has developed workarounds to deal with it.
Story
Archive |
| 6/5/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Diebold |
Santa Cruz County. Three touch screen e-voting machines broke down and had to be replaced.
Story
Archive |
| 11/4/2008 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
Sequoia |
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. |
| 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.
Story
Archive
Story2
Archive2 |
| 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.
Story
Archive
More details |
| 11/4/2009 |
Machine malfunction |
CA |
ESS |
Merced County. Four "election computers" were not working properly early in the day and were repaired.
Story
Archive |
| 10/18/2004 |
Malfeasance |
CA |
|
Santa Clara County. Poll workers are being trained not to tell voters that they can vote on paper ballots, contrary to the edict of Secretary of State Shelley. Instead, they will make paper ballots available only if voters specifically request them. Story |
