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Election Problem Log - 2004 to 2009
Check out our other problem logs!
VotersUnite! began this problem log with the November 2004 election. It continued its compilation of problems reported in the media by adding news stories about subsequent elections, through 2009. See also: Failures by vendor and Failures by state.
Sort Order:               
Date Problem Type State
Vendor
Description
11/5/2008 Machine malfunction FL Sequoia Palm Beach County. Problems with four memory cartridges from the optical scanners have prevented county election officials from posting complete unofficial results of Tuesday's race. While tests were still being done, Assistant County Administrator Brad Merriman said it is likely the ballots themselves will be run through tabulating machines later today. The bad cartridges represent thousands of votes. Story Archive
11/5/2008 Machine malfunction IN Diebold Tippecanoe County. One of the memory cards holding early votes from the touch screen machine did not upload properly. Story Archive
11/5/2008 Machine malfunction KS ESS Crawford County. A programming defect between the ballot cards (run through the M100) and the iVotronic electronic voting machines in three precincts at a Pittsburg ward may have switched the votes in certain local races. Story Archive

Update 11/7/08: The scanners were not programmed to handle the rotation of candidates on the ballots. The error affects four races; only the County Attorney's race is close. Story Archive Story2 Archive2

Update 11/9/08. Officials found another tabulation error. One of the backup scanners might not have read votes on the Arma sales tax question. Story Archive

Update 11/12/08. Only 14 votes separates the two candidates for the County Attorney's race. The county will hand recount that race on the nearly 16,000 ballots scanned by the M100 optical scanners. Story Archive

11/5/2008 Machine malfunction KY Danaher Madison County. A data disc containing votes from a Berea precinct voting machine (presumably the Shouptronic 1242) could not be read. The county uses two types of voting machines - the Shouptronic and the Hart InterCivic eSlate - and the program that combines the votes from them won't generate a total until all discs are read. So the county was unable to obtain any totals until the problem was resolved. Story Archive
11/5/2008 Machine malfunction NC ESS Rockingham County. The central tabulator failed to read the memory cards from the optical scanners at five of the six one-stop voting sites. The county uses M100 scanners. Story Archive
11/5/2008 Machine malfunction NC ESS Polk County. Results for the County Board of Elections flip flop twice as the county struggles with a malfunction in the computer reporting system. Rebooting seems to help, but then results flip again. Then winners are declared. County officials speculate that some of the precincts were counted twice by the software. Story Archive
11/5/2008 Machine malfunction NC ESS Craven County. Three technicians from Print Elect "jury-rigged an M-650 rapid counter with a paper clip to help speed up the absentee ballot counting process." Story Archive
11/5/2008 (Other) NV Sequoia Washoe County. 40 of the county's 1300 memory cartridges contained no votes. One memory cartridge goes into each of the AVC Edge electronic voting machines to record the voters' choices. Story Archive Update: 11/5/08. The county discovered that those blank cartridges had not been used in any machines. Story Archive
11/5/2008 Machine malfunction OH Diebold Miami County. A memory card failed, halting the scanning of ballots and leaving the officials with 10 boxes of ballots that had to be rescanned. Extra scanners from Diebold/Premier had to be brought in to complete the tabulating. Story Archive Story2 Archive2
11/5/2008 Machine malfunction PA ESS Centre County. Officials said there was a difference in how one of the new Model 100 optical scanner machines counted the votes in the 26th precinct, as opposed to the actual number of ballots cast. Workers were counting the ballots by hand as of noon. Similar vote count problems with two other State College precincts were corrected early Wednesday. Story Archive
11/5/2008 Machine malfunction SC ESS Charleston County. Problems uploading data from the iVotronic touch screen machines caused officials to enter the data by hand into the central system. Story Archive Story2 Archive2
11/5/2008 Machine malfunction WV ESS Marion County. The system failed to read the Personal Electronic Ballot (PEB) cartridges holding the votes of 4,600 early voters. The ES&S technician on hand was unable to solve the problem. Eventually, the county officials managed to get the votes uploaded and tallied. Story Archive
More on 11/6/08. 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
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.
11/4/2008 Too few ballots CA 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. I was also told that I would be the last person who could vote at that time because they just ran out of ballots. The volunteers told me that they had called to request more ballots at 7:30 a.m., and had still not received any. They had to turn away at least 10 people in line behind me.
11/4/2008 Paper ballots (late) CO Reported to 1-866-OURVOTE: Absentee voters still haven't received absentee ballots. Story
11/4/2008 Machine malfunction CT Diebold Torrington in Litchfield County. Diebold optical scanners wouldn't read the memory cards required to scan the ballots. Prepared for this problem, officials had back up cards ready at every precinct. [Kudos to them!] Story Archive
11/4/2008 Ballot printing FL Broward County. A batch of about 40 paper ballots had one proposed change to Florida's constitution (Amendment 3) printed twice. Optical scanners rejected the ballots. Story Archive
11/4/2008 Deceptive practices FL Broward County. A man in the voter line of a predominantly African-American precinct was telling voters they were supposed to vote at a different location. Some voters received robo-calls last night telling them Democrats were supposed to vote on Wednesday. Story Archive
11/4/2008 Machine malfunction FL Sequoia Palm Beach County. The Insight optical scanner jammed at one polling place for much of the morning. Two other precincts reported problems (undescribed). Story Archive
11/4/2008 Machine malfunction FL Optical scan machine failures are one of the leading issues facing voters in counties across Florida, according to Election Protection. Voters have reported malfunctioning optical scan machines and massive machine breakdowns in over 35 separate precincts and 25 counties in some of the most populous counties including Orange, Hillsborough, Miami-Dade, and Sarasota. Story Archive
11/4/2008 Machine malfunction FL Diebold Manatee County. When officials attempt to upload the vote data from memory cards into the central tabulator, they get an error message that prevents them from tallying the votes. About 2/3 of the county's ballots are affected. Officials say this has not happened before. Story Archive

Update 11/5/08. As many as 50,000 ballots are not yet counted. The results of the election could be delayed in several races, including Palmetto mayor and commission seats, a Bradenton Beach commission seat and in the multi-county races for Florida House District 69 and the public defender’s post. Story Archive

Update 11/5/08. Diebold/Premier eventually figured out the problem was caused by the software's inability to handle a candidate dropping out of a small race for fire commissioner after the computer program was written. Story Archive Story2 Archive2

Update 11/6/08. A simple change in one Manatee County race, where a candidate dropped out last week, caused the Premier software program known as GEMS to lock up. That prevented the counting of 46,000 ballots on Tuesday night, Supervisor of Elections Bob Sweat said. Story3 Archive3

11/4/2008 Paper ballots (late) FL Reported to 1-866-OURVOTE: Absentee voters still haven't received absentee ballots. Story
11/4/2008 Too few machines FL Broward County. 400 people were in line at a predominantly African-American polling place in Deerfield Beach. One voting machine was there to accommodate them. Later in the day, seven more machines were delivered. Story Archive
11/4/2008 E-pollbook GA Fulton County (Atlanta). In north Fulton County, some voters had to vote provisional ballots because the election database showed they had already voted. They had not. Story Archive
11/4/2008 Machine malfunction GA Diebold Fulton County (Atlanta). In South Fulton County, all voting machines at the Bible Way Ministries precinct went down for about an hour and then the polling place ran out of printed ballots and paper provisional ballots. The voting machines were working again an hour later. Story Archive
11/4/2008 Voter intimidation GA Fulton County (Atlanta). About 20 senior citizens, many of them using wheelchairs or walkers, were turned away from the polling place at Wheat Street Towers when it opened and told to come back later, said the manager of the senior housing complex and one of the residents. A sign was posted at the entrance to the polling place, inside the complex, that voters 75 and older could vote only between 9:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. even though voting hours are 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. A spokesman for the Fulton County elections office said, “That is completely incorrect.” He said voters with disabilities and 75 and older are allowed to go to the front of the line between those hours but there is no limit on when they can vote. Story Archive
11/4/2008 Check-in problems IA Polk County. A voter was turned away, mistaken for her sister who had voted absentee. 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
11/4/2008 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.
11/4/2008 Ballot printing IN ESS Madison County. Coding on over half the early-voting ballots printed by ES&S was positioned wrong on the paper, preventing the tabulators from being able to count the votes. Story Archive
11/4/2008 Deceptive practices IN Reported to 1-866-OURVOTE: - flyers and calls giving voters serious misinformation, like instructing people to vote on Wednesday. Story
11/4/2008 Machine malfunction KY Hart InterCivic Kenton County. The Kenton County Board of Elections has halted voting on the eSlate electronic voting machines (supplied and maintained by Harp Election Services) because they are not properly recording straight-ticket voting. Voters complained that straight-ticket voting in the State Senate race between Republican incumbent Jack Westwood and Democrat Kathy Groob was not being counted. Story Archive

Update: A judge ordered the county to shut down 108 eSlate machines. The malfunctions could affect the tightly contested state Senate race. Story Archive Story2

Update 11/9/08: Poll workers had continued to allow voters to use the machines so the county had to separate out the straight party votes. In an unusual display of accountability, Harp Election Services accepted responsibility for misprogramming the machines, and Kenton County Clerk Rodney Eldridge accepted responsibility for not checking the operation of the straight-party selections on the machine before the election. Story Archive

11/4/2008 Paper ballots (late) LA Reported to 1-866-OURVOTE: Absentee voters still haven't received absentee ballots. Story
11/4/2008 E-pollbook MD Prince George County. At Takoma Park Middle School, where the electronic poll book broke down at 8 a.m., the precinct’s chief Democratic election judge Marlon Sellow tried repeatedly to get a replacement from the Montgomery County Board of Elections. To calm the concerns of the voters, whose patience he praised, Sellow said he told them the precinct was not provided enough electronic poll books to accommodate the large turnout. This incomplete truth — after all, the problem was not quantity but quality — helped to maintain the voters’ faith in the system, Sellow said. Story Archive
11/4/2008 Machine malfunction MD Diebold Prince George County. Voters had to wait up to four hours when only two of the six touch screen voting machines were in operation at Towers of Westchester Park Building in College Park. Story Archive
11/4/2008 Too few machines MD Diebold Prince George County. Four hours was the waiting time at the Rollingcrest-Chillum Community Center in Hyattsville, as two machines were not enough to accommodate the massive turn out of seniors in that neighborhood. Too few machines at Bishop McNamara High School in Forestville also contributed to a four-hour wait. Story Archive
Records: 121-160 of 1280
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