Common Cause > High Profile Paperless Voting Machine Failures

High Profile Paperless Voting Machine Failures

Below are a number of instances where paperless electronic voting machines have added or removed votes in real elections, throwing the outcome of the election into question. Below are just a few examples where voting machine failures were so egregious that they were detected.

Florida

Sarasota County

The November, 2006 contest for Florida’s 13^th Congressional District during the November 2006 election a recent is still disputed. In the final tally of this election, an extraordinarily high number of ballots in Sarasota County - 17,846 - showed no vote cast.[1] But the race itself was decided by 369 votes.[2] In other words, the undervotes could have changed the outcome of the race if they had been registered. The high undervote rate is all the more stark because it was 4 to 5 times higher than the undervote rate in surrounding counties.[3] The cause of this extraordinarily high undervote is not known for certain, but the evidence points to machine related failure. Two lawsuits have ensued and an investigation is currently being conducted by the Government Accountability Office. Other similar machine malfunctions which have thrown elections into doubt and chaos are detailed at the following link

Miami-Dade County

During a special election on the issue of slot machines, Miami-Dade County’s new Elections Systems & Software (ES&S) iVotronic electronic voting machines produced more than 1,200 undervotes, despite the fact that there was only one issue on the ballot. Undervotes are counted ballots that contain no votes for candidates or issues, and a high number of them typically indicates a problem with the machine.

The county already had a history of election troubles. It was one of the counties scrutinized during the 2000 presidential election, and had continued problems in 2002 and 2004. Approximately one-third of the miscast votes were blamed on improper coding of cartridges by the county staff. Similar discrepancies were found in five other elections in the prior twelve months, though officials say that the amount of undervotes couldn’t have affected the outcome of any of those elections.[4]

In the meantime, the current elections supervisor Lester Sola has since recommended that the county replace their $25 million system for an optical scanning system, citing the decline in voter confidence and increasing costs associated with the current paperless electronic voting system.[5]

Texas

During the 2006 March Texas primaries in March, a programming error caused voting machines in Tarrant County to record an additional 100,000 votes that were never actually cast. Election officials were shocked when the initial tallies showed that 158,000 voters came to the polls, a number that would have shattered the previous primary turnout record and more than doubled the turnout of 76,000 in 2002.

A programming mistake in the machine’s software by a company responsible for both hardware and software, Hart Intercivic, boosted vote totals far beyond the 58,000 votes that were actually cast.  The company said that the error boosted the totals equally for every candidate and that the election outcomes were not affected.[6]

Hart Intercivic accepted full responsibility for the error, but some people were not satisfied with the outcome. Justice Steve Smith, a candidate for the Texas State Supreme Court, filed a formal challenge to the election results, which showed he lost his bid by 6,000 votes. In a statement to the Fort Worth Star Telegram, he wrote, “We have good reason to believe that the vote total in incorrect, and we believe that the election must not be finally decided until all the votes are correctly counted.”[7]

North Carolina

In November 2004, 4,438 votes were lost by an electronic voting machine in Carteret County, North Carolina, leaving the race for state agricultural commissioner in limbo for months. On Election Night, 3.3 million ballots were cast and Republican Steve Troxler led Democrat Britt Cobb by 2,287 votes.  With almost twice that amount of votes permanently erased, a contentious legal battle ensued that only ended three months later when Cobb decided to concede the election.[8]

The source of the error was the Unilect Patriot, a touchscreen voting machine. Like most paperless electronic voting systems, it had no backup system. In 2005, the Cartaret Board of Elections unanimously voted to replace the Unilect machines. “You cannot believe how much damage that has done to the question of voter confidence in the county,” said Ed Pond, the county elections board chairman.[9]

Pennsylvania

In April 2005, Pennsylvania decertified the UniLect Patriot electronic voting machine after concluding that defects in the system were re responsible for more than 10,000 uncounted votes in three different counties in November 2004. When the state re-examined the machines after the elections, it found that the machines often failed to register votes after the voter pressed the screen to make his or her selection.  The machines were also prone to freezing up during use.[10]

In a separate incident in Berks County, Pennsylvania, involving voting machines manufactured by Danaher Controls, 111 votes were lost when the cartridges used to record votes were accidentally programmed as training cartridges during the May 2005 primary election.[11] Election results showed that three races were decided by less than 111 votes. After much controversy, the Berks County Election Board ultimately voted against having a re-vote.[12]

Virginia

The failure of ten electronic voting machines cast doubt on the results of a local election in Fairfax County, Virginia during November 2003. Voters claimed that the machines failed to register their votes for incumbent school board member Rita S. Thompson (R), who lost by 1,662 votes. When testing one of the questionable machines, elections officials observed that it appeared to subtract a vote from Thompson for about one out of every 100 attempts to vote for her.

According to reports from multiple voters, the machine would initially display an “x” next to Thompson’s name after she was selected, but the “x” would disappear seconds later. Another voter said that it took him four or five tries to register his vote for Thompson.[13]

It was impossible to determine whether lost votes were intended for Thompson or whether other candidates also lost votes, and the questionable elections results were certified without any adjustment.[14] 

New Mexico

A week before the 2004 election, Bernalillo County Clerk Mary Herrera admitted recurrent problems with vote recording software and that phantom votes had been recorded in three separate elections. She said that, in one instance, a candidate received an additional 4,000 votes that did not exist.  However, Herrera claimed that the phantom votes were found before they were added to the final tally. [15]

In 2002, only three-quarters of ballots cast in Bernalillo County’s early voting period were initially tallied by Sequoia’s paperless electronic voting systems. According to Sequoia, 12,000 votes were omitted because “an employee had missed a step in the tallying process.” Apparently, the software program used to report election results did not have the capacity to handle the data.[16] The company developed a “patch” to expand the program’s capacity, but it wasn’t passed along to its technician in Bernalillo County. The mistake, originally noticed by a partisan attorney during post-election analysis, delayed certification of the election results while the Board of Commissioners corrected he results.[17]