Voting Machine Mess-up Du Jour (Displayed 07/25/04)

Putnam County, Tennessee. August, 2002. MicroVote MV-464 paperless voting machines. None of the totals matched up with the correct candidates.*
	As Putnam County election officials learned last night, when computers fail, the electoral process slows to the pace of 20th-century hand-held calculators. That's how counters there had to proceed when a glitch caused the computers to produce wrong totals. "Nothing you have is good," Administrator of Elections Nancy Boman explained to a reporter. After first reporting 20 of 44 precincts were in, Boman said officials noticed there were problems. "A write-in candidate received 1,000 votes, and we knew that it just didn't sound right, so we started looking closer. The computer had shifted all the numbers a line down. Nothing was right," she said.

Thank you to Nancy Boman for noticing the problem and following up on it.

* Glitch slows counting in Putnam; Mullinix leads in Fentress voting. The Tennessean. August 2, 2002. By Leon Alligood, Staff Writer.

See: MicroVote in the News

There's really no way
that I could prove to a voter,
post tally, that their vote
exactly counted the way that they voted it.
~ James M. Ries Jr.
President of MicroVote