Election Project

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Do you guys want to help hone in on this election info. I've got 21 machine malfunctions. We've got the voting opression in Ohio. There's several local elections that have been overturned. We've got new ballots in Washington State, where ballots were wrongly disqualified because of signatures. We've got yesterday's petition. There's too much information and too many stupid statistical analyses muddying up the mix. We need to get a straight fact based piece out there, that's what I think. I just don't have time and my old tired brain just goes foggy trying to get it all together.

If we can get something straight and concise, I'm pretty sure I can get it on a few blogs and maybe it will get picked up from there.

I don't know what we can do about this election in the end, but voting in this country is a disaster. My theme will be, HAVA allocated FOUR BILLION DOLLARS to fix this mess and it's worse than ever.

I just can't do this alone, but I can post what I've gathered and maybe together we can put out a logical reasoned plea.

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1. First, for example

Here's the machine malfunctions only. NOT the times people voted for Bush and the machine flipped them to Kerry, that's another issue. These need to have the number of votes and any resolution that's been discovered or not discovered. I'd like to add up the total number of votes we're talking about just on these "glitches" alone.

Computer glitch blamed for miscount in JP voting

The glitch was discovered by Carroll County Election Commission members when they met to certify election results Monday at the Berryville courthouse.
It is believed that the programming alignment was out of kilter, as provided by Election Systems and Software, the company that programs computer chips to read the local ballots.
As a result, ballots for the JP District 2 race will either be hand counted, or re-run through the optical scanner machine once the correct computer chip is provided.

DELAND Volusia County wants answers from the supplier of its electronic vote-counting equipment after glitches plagued the system yet again. A memory-card failure at an early-voting site in Daytona Beach wiped out 13,244 votes cast from Oct. 18 to Sunday. Memory-card breakdowns in six machines left political contests in limbo for hours and forced officials to scramble for results. Seminole County, which uses the same equipment as Volusia, experienced similar delays because of problems with three machines.
The Broward County Elections Department has egg on its face today after a computer glitch misreported a key amendment race, according to WPLG-TV in Miami. "The software 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," said Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman.

Nine voting machines ran out of battery power and nearly 40 votes may have been lost in Palm Beach County, the first major problem reported on Election Day in the state that was the epicenter of the election fiasco four years ago.


In Collier County, the software on a separate computer that is used for tabulating results that was home to the problem. The glitch went something like this: Elections officials pulled voting information off the ES&S IVotronic machines and fed it into the Dell computer where it would be made into a report about voting results. The Dell had been used to go through some dry runs ahead of balloting on Tuesday, but those numbers were supposed to be d from the machine, or "zeroed out." But a file containing numbers that had not been d was added to the vote totals, throwing off the results.

The computer glitch that has delayed LaPorte County’s voter turnout figures from Tuesday’s election still hasn’t been fixed. The problem lies in the column that is supposed to reflect the number of registered voters per precinct. The column erroneously showed that every precinct had a total of 300 registered voters.
A programming error in Fidlar optical scanners in Franklin County led to a recount last week. The error caused straight-party Democratic ballots to be counted for Libertarian candidates and straight-party Libertarian ballots to be counted for Democratic candidates, Fidlar officials said. The recount changed the outcome of the election, awarding one of three seats to formerly defeated Democrat Carroll Lanning and taking a seat from the initially declared winner, Republican Roy N. Hall. Hall is considering a challenge.

Sarpy County election officials are trying to figure out how they ended up with more votes than voters in the general election. As many as 10,000 extra votes have been tallied and candidates are still waiting for corrected totals. Deputy Sarpy County Election Commissioner Ed Gilbert, "The only thing we know is that if you load the disc out there, it reads fine. They didn't read fine on this computer."

More than 4,438 votes irretrievably lost in coastal Carteret County NC could trigger a new statewide election if the official margin of victory in two Council of State races is close enough, state election officials said Monday. The manufacturer of their push-button voting machines, California-based Unilect, told Carteret officials that the machines would hold more than 10,000 votes. They actually held 3,000 because the computer software had not been updated by Unilect, as the county's maintenance contract apparently required, Bartlett said.

According to election-office data downloaded by the Observer, 102,109 people voted early or returned valid absentee ballots. But unofficial results show 106,064 people casting early and absentee votes for president. Dickerson said the typical post-election audit would have caught the problem, but he acknowledged that a discrepancy of this magnitude was unprecedented in his six years as elections director in the state's largest county. Dickerson suspected that some results may have been counted twice.

In Craven County, problems with Electronic Systems and Software Inc. voting machines surfaced in one-stop early voting, requiring all screens to be replaced. An election night Unity software glitch caused a double count of votes from nine precincts as absentee balloting totals were added, giving Michalek a victory in District 5 until the Sun Journal discovered the double votes the day after the election.

The absence of a password for Vanceboro's one-stop master terminal resulted in an early miscount there as well.

In Yadkin County, about 1,000 ballots were accidentally counted twice.

In Guilford County NC, early voting machines had capacity problems, which affected anywhere from 6,000 to 20,000 ballots.
A computer error with a voting machine cartridge gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in a Gahanna precinct. Franklin County's unofficial results gave Bush 4,258 votes to Democratic challenger John Kerry's 260 votes in Precinct 1B. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. Damschroder said after Precinct 1B closed, a cartridge from one of three voting machines at the polling place generated a faulty number at a computerized reading station. The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race. Damschroder said the cartridge was retested Thursday and there were no problems. He couldn't explain why the computer reader malfunctioned. Workers checked the cartridge against memory banks in the voting machine Thursday 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.

In Tulsa, OK, a smear on ballot next to Republican name, makes all democrat votes register as overvotes, optical scan.

Mercer County PA - Lark cited statistics collected by a poll worker at the Farrell municipal building poll, which showed the voting machine recorded that 289 people cast ballots. The machine, however, recorded a total of 48 votes for U.S. Sen. John Kerry and three votes for George W. Bush in the presidential race. Even the county's Web site appeared to show a similar conflict, reporting that 51,818 people cast ballots but 47,768 ballots were recorded in the presidential race, including 61 write-ins. It would appear that about 4,000 votes could be unaccounted for.

Lexington SC town officials are searching for a way to tally more than 200 ballots stuck in a broken voting machine.

Wichita Falls TX More than 6,900 of about 26,000 ballots - mostly early votes - did not record votes for president with 10 of 52 precincts reporting. Similar problems were noted on all other races. Such a high count of "undervotes" is unusual, Gossom said. "We think the problem was in the program and the way it counted straight party votes," Martin said.


Collin County TX elections officials reported they had sent the machine's memory card to Diebold laboratories in Canada so technicians there could extract the 63 votes.

33,000 votes went uncounted in Utah County's unofficial Election Day tally. While running a pre-election test on the punch-card reading machines, computer specialists failed to ensure the devices were doling out the votes cast on straight-party ballots to individual races. As a result, more than one in five of the 151,237 votes cast in the county were not tallied.