A Sampling of Election 2004 News Reports

OHIO. Columbus. Sworn testimony shows a disparity between the number of voting machines provided to different precincts.

FLORIDA. Palm Beach County. Low-income voters told to vote in the wrong precinct.

OHIO. Lawyers who have been documenting voting day problems in Ohio say they'll challenge the results of the presidential election. Documented cases of long lines, a shortage of machines and a pattern of problems in predominantly black neighborhoods are enough evidence to bring such a challenge.

FLORIDA. Volusia County. Audit discrepancies, such as precinct-based Election Day results that differ from last week's final tally.

FLORIDA. Broward County. University of California's Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team reports irregularities associated with Broward County electronic voting machines that may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to Bush.

NORTH CAROLINA. Gaston County. The number of recorded votes and voters don't match in more than half of the precincts.

NORTH CAROLINA. Cleveland County. State officials learned that precinct workers left 120 provisional ballots behind at a Cleveland County fire station on Election Day, and firefighters threw the ballots away the next day.

OHIO. Montgomery County. In two precincts there was no presidential vote recorded on 1/4 of the ballots.

FLORIDA. Escambia County. While the machines accurately counted the number of absentee votes, they began feeding an incorrect result into the office's computers. The tabulation error showed more than 85% turnout, when it was closer to 75%.

INDIANA. Ripley County. An error with Diebold optical scan memory cards, had the wrong precinct labels, so the cards were sent back to the company to be reprogrammed.

INDIANA. Hendricks County. 102 provisional ballots were given to voters who registered through registration drives, but whose names were not on the rolls.

OHIO. Sandusky County. Elections officials discovered some ballots in nine precincts were counted twice using ES&S optical scan.

WASHINGTON. Grays Harbor County. Elections officials started recounting about 28,000 ballots on Tuesday after the ES&S Unity reporting system showed too many votes.

COLORADO. Instructions on absentee ballots were wrong in several counties, including Denver and Adams.

COLORADO. Adams County. Many Denver precincts ran out of voting materials hours before the polls closed, leaving voters waiting in long lines while additional materials were dispatched.

COLORADO. Election judges in Boulder, Denver, Jefferson, Douglas and Weld counties gave incorrect instructions to voters about IDs, and sent dozens of these voters away without allowing them to cast ballots.

FLORIDA. Hundreds of voters couldn't vote because their early orders for ballots disappeared.

OHIO. Polling places in Northeast Ohio had half the number of voting machines that were needed. This caused a bottleneck at polling stations, and many people left without voting.

FLORIDA. Orange County. Absentee ballot tabulator (ES&S) started counting backwards after 32,767 ballots. A similar discrepancy affected vote totals posted online for the U.S. Senate race between Republican Mel Martinez and Democrat Betty Castor.

INDIANA. Franklin County. Fidlar's optical-scan equipment gave straight-party Democrat votes to Libertarians, affecting the outcome of the county commissioners' race.

MINNOSOTA. Many went to vote and discovered they weren't registered.

NORTH CAROLINA. Gaston County. About 12,000 votes cast in Gaston County have not yet been counted. Most early and absentee votes were not included in the county's unofficial election results because of a procedural error. The county pays a technician from Diebold to operate its systems on Election Day.

NORTH CAROLINA. Gaston County. After data was transmitted from the precincts to the central station, it was discovered that there was no data for the Dallas precinct in the GEMS database (1209 votes)

OHIO. Columbus. Carol Shelton was the presiding judge at a Columbus precinct with three machines for 1,500 registered voters. At her home precinct in Clintonville, she said there were three machines for 730 voters.

WASHINGTON. Washington state Democrats sued election officials Friday in the state's largest county. The lawsuit would block election officials in King County, home to Seattle, from discarding about 900 provisional ballots. [Note: they won the suit.]

ALABAMA. An Associated Press survey of 59 of Alabama's 67 counties showed officials accepting only 1,836 of 6,560 provisional votes, or about 28 percent.

INDIANA. Franklin County. Optical scan equipment counted straight-party votes for Democratic candidates as Libertarian votes. A programming error in the Fidlar optical scan system caused the miscount. One race was overturned when the program was corrected.

OHIO. Cuyahoga County. A new ruling about counting provisional ballots was instituted on November 9 at 2:30 pm. which stated ballots would be rejected if there is no date of birth on the packet. The original "Provisional Verification Procedure" from Cuyahoga County stated "Date of birth is not mandatory and should not reject a provisional ballot." One of the clerks said, "This is new. This just came down. They just changed it in the last thirty minutes."

PENNSYLVANIA. Mercer County. Director of elections and director of technology said a computer software problem (not voters incorrectly touching the screen) caused Unilect Patriot touch-screen voting machines to malfunction in about a dozen precincts.

TEXAS. Collin County. Diebold touch screen voting machine locked up on election day. County officials sent the memory card to Diebold labs in Canada so technicians there could get the totals.

COLORADO. Boulder County. Some of the scanners (Hart Intercivic) were not functioning during part of the count. eSlate voting machines failed to read several thousand ballots.

NORTH CAROLINA. Guilford County. ES&S early voting machines had capacity problems, which affected anywhere from 6,000 to 20,000 ballots. ES&S explained that the Unity 2.2 tally software reached 32,767 (32K) and began subtracting from the totals (same as in Broward County). ES&S had known about the problem but not told its customers.

ALABAMA. Madison. During last week's general election, some Madison voters stood in line for hours to vote only to be turned away because they were at the wrong voting place.

NORTH CAROLINA .Craven County. "A master terminal at the Vanceboro one-stop voting site did not require a password and resulted in an incorrect total in the presidential returns there." ES&S

NORTH CAROLINA. Carteret County. Unilect e-voting machine lost 4500 votes.

NORTH CAROLINA. Wake County (Raleigh). Reviewing and counting 15,000 Provisional ballots may cause the county to miss the deadline for reporting totals. 75,000 ballots were cast statewide.

NEW MEXICO. Bernalillo County Clerk says roughly 25 percent of the provisional ballots have been rejected as invalid.

OHIO. Mahoning County. One precinct in Youngstown, Ohio, recorded a negative 25 million votes, which was discarded from official results. [ES&S iVotronic voting machines]

FLORIDA. Broward County. In many cases, clerks at the polling places gave provisional ballots to people who could have voted regularly, deputy registrar Salas said.

NEW JERSEY. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of students at Rutgers University thought they were registered only to find that they weren't on the rolls and could only vote provisionally. Many colleges are reporting the same problem.

TEXAS. Willacy County. Too few memory packs somehow caused the County Clerk to read machine reports wrong and initially report double the votes for president.

INDIANA. Porter County. Officials find 188 uncounted absentee ballots.

OHIO. Mercer County. One voting machine showed that 289 people cast (punch card) ballots, but only 51 votes were recorded for president. 51,818 people cast ballots but 47,768 ballots were recorded in the presidential race. It would appear that about 4,000 votes (nearly 7%) could be unaccounted for.

OHIO. Auglaize County. Joe McGinnis, a former employee of ES&S, the company that provides the voting system, was on the main computer that is used to create the ballot and compile election results.

PENNSYLVANIA. Mercer County. Glitches with electronic touch-screen voting machines occurred in about a dozen precincts in the county's southwestern corner.

NEBRASKA. Sarpy County. A computer problem doubled the votes in half the county's precincts, adding over 10,000 phantom votes to the totals. The county uses ES&S vote tallying software.

OHIO Columbus. A Danaher ELECTronic 1242 computer error with a voting machine cartridge gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in a Gahanna precinct. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.

OHIO Warren County. Citing concerns about potential terrorism, officials locked down the county administration building on election night and blocked anyone from observing the vote count as the nation awaited Ohio's returns. The Warren results were part of the last tallies that helped clinch President Bush's re-election

FLORIDA. Lee County. More than 40,000 ballots remain to be counted after Wednesday. Story

FLORIDA. Broward County. ES&S vote tabulating software used for absentee ballots "is not geared to count more than 32,000 votes in a precinct. So what happens when it gets to 32,000 is the software starts counting backward. The same software is used in Martin and Miami-Dade Counties.

FLORIDA. Collier County. Central computer added test votes to the tally on the ES&S tabulation software.

FLORIDA. Volusia County. Memory-card breakdowns in six machines left political contests in limbo for hours. Seminole County had similar memory card failures.

INDIANA. LaPorte County. Software flaw reported the total for every precinct to be 300 votes. That means the total number of voters for the county would be 22,200, although there are actually more than 79,000 registered voters. ES&S

MARYLAND. Data transmission failures occurred in 14 precincts.

NORTH CAROLINA. More than 4,500 Carteret County votes have been lost on a Unilect electronic voting machine.

NORTH CAROLINA. Mecklenburg County. Before the election, the county election office said 102,109 people voted early or returned valid absentee ballots. Unofficial results from election night showed 106,064 of those votes.

NORTH CAROLINA. Craven County. All vote totals in nine of the county's 26 precincts were electronically doubled, increasing the totals for president by 11,283 more than the number of votes cast. ES&S Votronic machines used.

TEXAS. Wichita County. More than 6,900 of about 26,000 ballots - mostly early votes - did not record votes for president . Election officials believe ES&S machines are counting votes correctly but that computer programs that process results are malfunctioning.

MARYLAND. Hundreds of student voters at the University of Maryland, College Park, were turned away because they had been improperly registered by a campus organization.

OHIO. Mahoning County. 20 to 30 ES&S iVotronic machines that needed to be recalibrated during the voting process because some votes for a candidate were being counted for that candidate's opponent.

OHIO. Cincinnati. A spokeswoman for the Election Protection Coalition. Said that people stood in line for over an hour in the rain in some places only to find they were in the wrong line for their precinct. A lot of them gave up and went home.

OHIO. Cincinnati. Long lines and some confusion met many Hamilton County voters at the polls early this morning, with polls suddenly crowded with hundreds of vote challengers and poll monitors, most of them in heavily Democratic and overwhelmingly African-American precincts.

SOUTH CAROLINA. Horry County. The Carolina Forest precinct had four voting machines for 2,003 voters, but one went down around noon, and poll manager Mary Baldwin said technicians were notified but were not able to fix it.

FLORIDA. At least 21 voting machines in Broward County malfunctioned and were replaced Tuesday. Most of them had been used by some voters before being taken out of service.

FLORIDA. Voters in Pompano Beach discovered their precinct had been moved .The discovery was made after an unknown number of voters had cast provisional ballots at the Civic Center. A similar problem at Precinct 72Q in Weston,. These provisional ballots will not count because they must be cast in a voter's exact precinct.

IOWA. Linn County. GOP poll watcher "was trying to challenge people for legitimately changing their address," said County Auditor Linda Langenberg.

INDIANA. Marion County. Registered voters have been turned away from area polling sites today because their names were mistakenly purged from poll books

LOUISIANA. Problems with (ES&S) iVotronic machines occurred in Louisiana after officials improperly formatted ballots so that systems labeled non-provisional ballots as provisional, and vice versa.

MISSISSIPPI. Hinds County. Election officials were sent to a heavily black precinct to check reports that voting machines were separated for Democrats and Republicans, with more machines on the GOP side. The situation was corrected by mid-morning.

MISSISSIPPI. Jackson. Some early voters at a Hattiesburg precinct were wrongly informed Tuesday they couldn't vote if they were wearing clothing promoting the University of Southern Mississippi, election officials said.

NORTH CAROLINA. Voting a straight party ticket DOES NOT include a vote for president. Voters must vote for a presidential candidate separately

NEW JERSEY. In Newark, more than 200 voters sought court orders because they were turned away from a polling place, mostly because their names were not on voter lists.In 95 percent of the cases judges later ruled they could cast ballots.

OHIO. State J. Kenneth Blackwell said voters could not cast provisional ballots despite not receiving their absentee ballots in time. A judge overruled him.

PENNSYLVANIA. Allegheny County. Dozens of precincts ran out -- or ran low on provisional ballots -- this afternoon. Voters were turned away.

SOUTH DAKOTA. Republican poll workers in Lake Andes were intimidating Native American voters on Monday, a federal judge ruled early today.

WASHINGTON. Snohomish County. Voters in at least four polling precincts said they have encountered problems with the Sequoia electronic voting machines. When they touched the screen to vote for a candidate, an indicator showed they had selected the opposing candidate.

FLORIDA. Leon and Alachua Counties. Students at Florida State, Florida A&M, and University of Florida. unknowingly had their party registration switched to Republican and their addresses changed. About 4,000 potential voters in all have been affected.

NEW JERSEY. In Trenton, Democrats warned that thousands of new voters' names were not on books at polls in Camden, Essex, Passaic and Mercer Counties and asked the state attorney general to protect those voters' rights.

OHIO. Lake County. Some voters received a memo on bogus Board of Elections letterhead informing voters who registered through Democratic and NACCP drives that they could not vote.

OHIO. Cleveland, unknown volunteers began showing up at voters' doors illegally offering to collect and deliver completed absentee ballots to the election office.

OHIO. Cleveland. Voters have been receiving phone calls incorrectly informing them that their polling place had changed.

OHIO. Civil rights lawyers for the Bush administration's Justice Department have notified a federal judge that they see no conflict with Republican plans to post 3600 partisan challengers in Ohio polling places on Election Day.

SOUTH CAROLINA. Charleston County. Election officials warned voters Friday to ignore a fake letter that purports to be from the NAACP. The letter threatens voters who have outstanding parking tickets or have failed to pay child support with arrest.

FLORIA. Broward County. 2505 absentee ballots were mailed on Saturday October 30.

FLORIDA. Broward and Miami-Dade counties both have about 1,058,000 registered voters, but Miami-Dade has 20 early-voting sites, compared with Broward's 14. Every Miami-Dade site is equipped with at least 20 voting machines, while some in Broward have fewer than 10. Some voters wait 4-1/2 hours in Broward to vote.

TEXAS. Johnson County. Voter registration forms supposedly handled by the Department of Public Services (motor voter) somehow never made it to county election officials. Voters have shown up at the polls and been told they aren't registered. Voters can request a provisional ballot, although such a ballot is worthless if the original registration form never made it from the DPS.

WISCONSIN. The state Republican Party demanded Saturday that Milwaukee city officials require identification for 37,000 voters with questionable addresses.

WISCONSIN. Milwaukee. A review by the city attorney's office found that hundreds of the 5,619 addresses the state Republican Party claimed were incorrect or nonexistent do exist. The database used by the Republicans was corrupt and dropping digits from valid addresses.

US. In opposition to the first Amendment and decades of precedents set by both the Justice Department and the Supreme Court, the U.S. Attorney General is arguing that only the Justice Department, and not voters themselves, may sue to enforce the voting rights set out in the Help America Vote Act.

GEORGIA. In two counties, individuals recently challenged the citizenship status of dozens of people on the voter rolls, based on their Spanish surnames.

NORTH CAROLINA. Alamance County. Earlier this month, the sheriff submitted a list of registered voters with Spanish surnames to the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in an attempt to determine whether or not they are U.S. citizens.

NEBRASKA. Douglas County with a half million population, changed polling places without notification of change.

FLORIDA. Broward County. 58,000 ballots that were supposed to mailed out on Oct. 7 and 8 are late and appear to be missing.

MARYLAND. Absentee ballots have an identifier on the outside envelope, indicating the party of the voter.

NEW MEXICO. Sandoval County problems escalate. Sequoia machines switch votes, won't register votes unless certain other races are voted, and switch straight party votes to another party.

OHIO Cuyahoga County. The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections has botched the registrations of more than 10,000 voters, preventing them from heading to the ballot box next week, according to a lawsuit filed late Monday.

MISSOURI. State law does not require unofficial voter registration groups to turn in forms to the officials. SoS Blunt condones such a law.

FLORIDA. Pasco County. People posing as election officials went to voters' homes and collected their absentee ballots.

NORTH DAKOTA. Cass County. ES&S printed 120,000 ballots with incorrect text. Both "yes" and "no" would approve a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Bar codes used for alignment were printed incorrectly, too. ES&S is responsible and will pay for reprinting.

NEVADA. Voters Outreach of America (Sproul and Associates) was caught ripping up Democratic registration forms.

OREGON. Voters Outreach of America may be destroying Democratic registration forms here, too.



All information from news reports collected by: VotersUnite.Org