Computer error at voting machine

Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes

Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes


Nov 5, 11:56 AM (ET)


COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.

Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.

Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch.

State and county election officials did not immediately respond to requests by The Associated Press for more details about the voting system and its vendor, and whether the error, if repeated elsewhere in Ohio, could have affected the outcome.


Bush won the state by more than 136,000 votes, according to unofficial results, and Kerry conceded the election on Wednesday after acknowledging that 155,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted in Ohio would not change the result.

The Secretary of State's Office said Friday it could not revise Bush's total until the county reported the error.

The Ohio glitch is among a handful of computer troubles that have emerged since Tuesday's elections.

In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. And in San Francisco, a malfunction with custom voting software could delay efforts to declare the winners of four races for county supervisor.

In the Ohio precinct in question, the votes are recorded onto a cartridge. On one of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred in the recording process, Damschroder said. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred.


Damschroder said people who had seen poll results on the election board's Web site called to point out the discrepancy. The error would have been discovered when the official count for the election is performed later this month, he said.

The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race on the machine.

Workers checked the cartridge against memory banks in the voting machine and each showed that 115 people voted for Bush on that machine. With the other machines, the total for Bush in the precinct added up to 365 votes.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a glitch occurred with software designed for the city's new "ranked-choice voting," in which voters list their top three choices for municipal offices. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes outright, voters' second and third-place preferences are then distributed among candidates who weren't eliminated in the first round.

When the San Francisco Department of Elections tried a test run on Wednesday of the program that does the redistribution, some of the votes didn't get counted and skewed the results, director John Arntz said.

"All the information is there," Arntz said. "It's just not arriving the way it was supposed to."

A technician from the Omaha, Neb. company that designed the software, Election Systems & Software Inc., was working to diagnose and fix the problem.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20041105/D865R1DO0.html

 

Just about every computer scientist in the country deemed the electronic voting boxes to be big POS's before the election. They're a box built onto MS Access for crying out loud.

 

Sorry, I didn't see Zion's post. Mods might want to lock this thread.

 

My God!!!! Say it aint so.

 

!@#$@#~

M$ Access ? THE crap ?!

 

Wow...no wonder everybody was worried.

Each state needs a big central data warehouse using Oracle on Unix boxes.

Then the voting stations can network with this central data warehouse for "instant" electronic results. I say "instant" because there would be a refresh process to the warehouse, but it would be close enough.

The the voting stations would also print out a paper ballot scantron that is readable by people and a scantron machine.

This would be the "official" ballot that would go in the voting box. Since the machine printed it out, there would be no "hanging chads" or incomplete bubbles filled in or any room for argument of the intent of the voter. There would be rules that would reject the ballot if something incorrect happened as well. So if somebody votes for 2 Presidents, it rejects the vote and informs the voter to correct the mistake.

The official ballot would be counted seperatly, either by scan tron or by hand if needed for a recount for the "official" result.

So on election night, you'd get "instant" unoffical results, and an auditable "official" paper result as well.

It would not be that hard at all. Major corporations have data warehouses that are much bigger and more complex that work with 99% data quality. Anyways...I think you could implement it. It would be trouble for extremely rural areas of the country, I guess, but the majority of the country, especially in dense population areas where most of the vote comes from anyways, you'd be set.

 

Unless there were 50 or more of those errors in Ohio its not going to make a difference.

 

"Waaaaa! I can't stand it! Dubooya got the popular vote by way more than 3 million! Waaaaaa! And the electoral majority! Waaaaa!!!"

 

MS Access???? WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This wouldn't have changed the outcome of the election, but come on people. Spend some money on a real database!

 

The only person who is comming off like a baby is you. Nobody in here has whined that this cost Kerry the victory.

 

Hey...I voted for Bush...I just think its dumb to have it go to MS access, they could have used a real data base.

 

Isn't exit polls done by polling? So ppl who voted told the polls who they voted for don't they? So voting error doesn't matter unless the votes are going to be counted like they did in 2000.

I didn't think Bush was/is a good president, but he won. It's over, and now the pressure is on him to be a uniter. To appoint judges that can go through like the 200+ that did last term and not the wacko southern ones that didn't (around 10).

I think he really need to find a good exit strategy in Iraq, instead of further putting this country in debt.

He needs to find resources to stop the nuclear threats of Iran and N. Korea.

It's a tough order, and his legacy will be based on what the does in this four years. For the sake of this country I wish him the best.

 

There are 2 different databases at play here. THe one that is local to every voting machine, and the one master database (probably state or county wide). I seriously doubt that the master database is access. The one local to the voting machine is - which is reasonable. You can't have Oracle, Sql Server, or DB2 running on all those little voting machines.

 

How about a software glitch that, when corrected, changed the outcome of an election?

That's what happened to Amendment Four in Florida.

Software tweak restores Broward 'yes' votes for Amendment 4

By Jeremy Milarsky and Rafael A. Olmeda
Staff Writer

November 5, 2004

FORT LAUDERDALE · A computing error discovered and corrected by Broward County officials early Thursday morning helped change the course of a statewide gambling issue.

Fixing the software glitch restored more than 32,000 "yes" votes cast for Amendment 4, contributing to the amendment's passage while sparking a demand for a recount. The demand was quickly rejected by state and local officials.

The glitch in Broward County's otherwise problem-free computer vote count was the result of human error: A technician failed to adjust the software to allow a greater vote tally than the limit set for smaller precinct counts, Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes said on Thursday.

The adjustments came in the hours before Broward County's canvassing board submitted preliminary election results to Florida's Secretary of State. The board, made up of Snipes, county Mayor Ilene Lieberman and County Court Judge Jerry Pollock, still has to finish its count of thousands of provisional and overseas ballots and a final count is due Nov. 13.

Candidates and committees have until that date to request any recount.

Total vote counts released on Thursday showed fewer voters turned out for this week's election than officials had predicted.

Broward County reported more than 700,000 voters cast ballots in the election, a turnout rate of 68 percent. Snipes had expected a 70 percent turnout. More than 175,000 of those people -- 1 in 4 voters -- cast ballots early at one of Snipes' offices around the county, and almost 100,000 voted by paper absentee ballot.

Of the total, only about 2,800 people cast so-called "undervotes" in the presidential race, declining to pick any candidate. In one case, a voter who filled out a provisional ballot selected George W. Bush for president, but crossed off running mate Dick Cheney and wrote in "John Kerry." The board treated it as an undervote.

Miami Dade County reported 775,465 people voted this year for a 73.24 percent turnout rate. Palm Beach County reported a total turnout of 454,427, for 62.29 percent.

Officials watching results at the Voting Equipment Center near downtown Fort Lauderdale first noticed the counting glitch when they saw vote totals on a Wednesday-night report of election results were actually lower than totals in a report printed hours earlier, despite the fact that officials had been counting paper absentee ballots all day.

"Clearly, it is a concern about the integrity of the system when the votes go down when more ballots are being fed into the system," Lieberman said.

Here's what went wrong, according to county officials:

While Broward County uses touch-screen machines for individual voting, the canvassing board has five machines designed to count paper absentee ballots. The computer software that generates a report of vote totals is designed to accept only 32,000 votes for each precinct.

Florida voters who opted to vote by absentee used several different ballot types and used ballots printed on multiple pages. Every one of those pages except the second contained localized races, such as a contest for a congressional seat, and therefore would stay under the precinct limitation.

But page two was the same statewide, so Broward's computer system counted each contest on that page -- state amendments 4 through 8 -- as four different precincts. When the absentee vote total for "yes" or "no" on each one of those amendments exceeded 32,000, the machine stopped counting them.

Once corrected, the county found more than 64,000 "yes" votes had been cast for Amendment 4, not just 32,000. Passage of Amendment 4 means county commissions in Broward and Miami-Dade counties can ask their voters in a referendum if they want to allow slot machines at seven tracks and jai alai frontons.

Lieberman said officials with Elections Systems and Software of Omaha, Neb. -- the company that manufactures Broward County's voting machines and software -- told her they noticed the software problem two years ago, after the fall 2002 election.

Hood spokeswoman Jenny Nash said the glitch could have been prevented if county technicians had prepared for it.

"When they're uploading the information, they have to set up a number of artificial precincts to accept all the ballots," she said. "It was a human error problem."

Broward Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes later agreed, saying an ES&S technician had failed to add the artificial "precincts."

A spokeswoman for ES&S, Becky Vollmer, confirmed that the company knew about the problem two years ago but said technicians were working with county officials to prevent it from happening again and plan to ask state officials to certify improved software next year.

Lieberman sent a letter to Hood on Thursday asking for more information about the glitch and for state officials to approve any new software if they haven't done so already.

"This glitch needs to be fixed immediately," she said.

An attorney representing groups opposed to Amendment 4 asked the canvassing board for an official recount. However, board attorney Ed Dion said such a recount was not warranted because the software glitch only affected the report showing vote totals, not the actual counting of votes.

Officials said a similar glitch could not happen in Palm Beach County, which uses voting machines from a different company, or in Miami-Dade County, which uses similar machines but different software.

On the undervote, 2,817 Broward voters indicated no choice in the presidential race. That represented a .44 percent rate. Of those presidential undervotes, the bulk were recorded for people using touch-screen voting machines on Tuesday.

The undervote rate for those voters fell by nearly half compared with the March Democratic presidential primary, where almost 1 in 100 Broward voters showed up at the polls for a single-issue election and cast blank ballots.

Early voters fared a bit better. The county reported a .28 percent presidential undervote rate for those voters, and .41 percent for voters who cast paper absentee ballots.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/lo...5nov05,0,4656830.story?coll=sfla-news-broward

 

Tis probably true.