| Date |
Problem Type |
State
|
Vendor
|
Description
|
| 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 |
| 5/2/2009 |
Wrong ballot |
IL |
Diebold |
St. Clair County. Ballots missing the mayoral race were handed out to some voters.
Story
Archive |
| 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 |
| 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. |
| 11/4/2008 |
Paper ballots (late) |
IL |
|
Reported to 1-866-OURVOTE: Absentee voters still haven't received absentee ballots.
Story |
| 11/4/2008 |
Registration errors |
IL |
|
Reported to VotersUnite: I and a coworker went to the Secretary of State's office on Golf Rd. in Niles to have our drivers license changed because we had both recently moved (this was on 8/26/08). We both filled out voter registration cards and both of our cards never made it to the appropriate county so we were unable to vote in today's election. This is the first election I have missed since I turned 18 (I turned 55 today!)
|
| 11/4/2008 |
Registration errors |
IL |
|
Reported to VotersUnite: I changed my address on 5/10/08 and re-registered to vote at the DMV in Aurora. I tried to vote today and was told I wasn't registered. |
| 10/20/2008 |
Registration errors |
IL |
|
DuPage County. Reports of people showing up to vote early, only to find they have been purged from the voter rolls, according to the DuPage chapter of the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project. "Some of these people had voted in the 2008 primary and some of these people have recently registered and arrived with verification."
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 |
| 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 |
| 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
|
| 2/5/2008 |
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
|
| 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 |
| 2/5/2008 |
Wrong ballot |
IL |
Hart InterCivic |
Peoria County. "A handful" of voters in Peoria, Illinois received the wrong electronic ballots, with only federal candidates, not local ones. These were intended for people who moved within 30 days of the election. However, people who had not moved got the ballots, apparently due to election judge error. "What happened in the situation this morning was that the judge just pushed the wrong button and issued the wrong access code and, even though they're trained, did not look to see that it was a federal only ballot."
Also, 15-minute power outages resulted in some voters using emergency paper ballots to vote and re-booting of electronic voting machines.
Story
Archive |
| 2/2/2008 |
Wrong ballot |
IL |
Hart InterCivic |
Kane County. The wrong electronic ballot was loaded into the eSlate voting machine for at least one voter. He accidentally cast his ballot before he realized he had not been able to vote on local races.
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. |
| 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
|
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 11/7/2006 |
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 |
| 11/7/2006 |
Wrong ballot |
IL |
|
Cook County. Voter was given a "Federal only" ballot, along with misinformation, and was only able to vote for the Congressional race.
Story
Archive |
| 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 |
| 11/2/2004 |
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 |
| 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 |
| 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. |
| 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. |
