"Sum of a Glitch"

[Paul Walmsley <paul@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Another fine article by Bev Harris.  It really reinforces the surreal
times we live in.  Despite evidence that computerized voting machines --
including paper ballot scanners -- miscount votes, elections officials
from Boulder County all the way up to the federal government continue to
resist even simple means of auditing these systems.

The article below is originally from _In These Times,_ but I found it on 
Common Dreams:

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0825-11.htm


- Paul


Published on Wednesday, August 25, 2004 by In These Times
Sum of a Glitch
Evidence Shows that Machines might be the Real Swing Voters this November
by Bev Harris
 

In the Alabama 2002 general election, machines made by Election Systems 
and Software (ES&S) flipped the governor's race. Six thousand three 
hundred Baldwin County electronic votes mysteriously disappeared after the 
polls had closed and everyone had gone home. Democrat Don Siegelman's 
victory was handed to Republican Bob Riley, and the recount Siegelman 
requested was denied. Three months after the election, the vendor 
shrugged. "Something happened. I don't have enough intelligence to say 
exactly what," said Mark Kelley of ES&S.

When I began researching this story in October 2002, the media was 
reporting that electronic voting machines are fun and speedy, but I looked 
in vain for articles reporting that they are accurate. I discovered four 
magic words, "voting machines and glitch," which, when entered into a 
search engine, yielded a shocking result: A staggering pile of miscounts 
was accumulating. These were reported locally but had never been compiled 
in a single place, so reporters were missing a disturbing pattern.

I published a compendium of 56 documented cases in which voting machines 
got it wrong.

How do voting-machine makers respond to these reports? With shrugs. They 
indicate that their miscounts are nothing to be concerned about. One of 
their favorite phrases is: "It didn't change the result."

Except, of course, when it did:

    * In the 2002 general election, a computer miscount overturned the 
House District 11 result in Wayne County, North Carolina. Incorrect 
programming caused machines to skip several thousand party-line votes, 
both Republican and Democratic. Fixing the error turned up 5,500 more 
votes and reversed the election for state representative.
    * This crushing defeat never happened: Voting machines failed to tally 
"yes" votes on the 2002 school bond issue in Gretna, Nebraska. This 
error gave the false impression that the measure had failed miserably, but 
it actually passed by a 2-to-1 margin. Responsibility for the errors was 
attributed to ES&S, the Omaha company that had provided the ballots and 
the machines.
    * According to the Chicago Tribune, "It was like being queen for a 
day -- but only for 12 hours," said Richard Miholic, a losing Republican 
candidate for alderman in 2003 who was told that he had won a Lake County, 
Illinois, primary election. He was among 15 people in four races affected 
by an ES&S vote-counting foul-up.
    * An Orange County, California, election computer made a 100 percent 
error during the April 1998 school bond referendum. The Registrar of 
Voters Office initially announced that the bond issue had lost by a wide 
margin; in fact, it was supported by a majority of the ballots cast. The 
error was attributed to a programmer's reversing the "yes" and 
"no" answers in the software used to count the votes.
    * A computer program that was specially enhanced to speed the November 
1993 Kane County, Illinois, election results to a waiting public did just 
that -- unfortunately, it sped the wrong data. Voting totals for a dozen 
Illinois races were incomplete, and in one case they suggested that a 
local referendum proposal had lost when it actually had been approved. For 
some reason, software that had worked earlier without a hitch had waited 
until election night to omit eight precincts in the tally.
    * A squeaker -- no, a landslide -- oops, we reversed the totals -- and 
about those absentee votes, make that 72-19, not 44-47. Software 
programming errors, sorry. Oh, and reverse that election, we announced the 
wrong winner. In the 2002 Clay County, Kansas, commissioner primary, 
voting machines said Jerry Mayo ran a close race but lost, garnering 48 
percent of the vote, but a hand recount revealed Mayo had won by a 
landslide, receiving 76 percent of the vote.

© 2004 In These Times