Posted on 11/08/2006 8:44:35 PM PST by weegee
Programming error miscounts votes in south Texas
Election official catches electronic voting maching problem
DALLAS — A programming error by a widely used Nebraska-based election system company Tuesday appears to be isolated to Hidalgo County in South Texas, election officials said.
The county's top election official discovered the mistake when early voting results in House District 28 put long-shot Constitution Party candidate Ron Avery ahead of popular Democratic incumbent Henry Cuellar by almost 2,000 votes with roughly 2,200 tabulated.
"We knew there was no way that could be correct," said Teresa Navarro, Hidalgo County elections administrator.
The problem was not in the touch screen voting machines, nor the cartridges that record the totals, but in the specific software program written to compile the totals, Navarro said.
The machines and cartridges correctly recorded votes and election officials were able to manually add votes based on the totals from each of the county's 500 voting machines.
"It was a coding-slash-programming error," Navarro said. "I can tell you the programmer is devastated."
Election Systems and Software, which employs the programmer, provides voting equipment to 145 of the 254 counties in Texas, according to the secretary of state.
Nationwide, the company provides voting equipment to about 1,800 jurisdictions in 43 states, spokesman Ken Fields said. An estimated 67 million voters used the company's equipment in the general election.
The incident was not serious enough for Texas officials to consider decertifying the company, said Scott Haywood, a spokesman for the secretary of state.
"I think the situation was dealt with appropriately and handled well once the problem was realized," Haywood said. "Here in Texas, voters can feel confident that their votes were counted in the way that they cast them."
Election Systems and Software provides the equipment in another Texas county where problems were reported Tuesday.
In Comal County, the software used in 12-year-old optical scanner machines did not "play nice" with the software in new touch-screen machines when officials tried to mesh the vote totals together. But County Clerk Joy Streater said her insistence on sticking with old equipment that used paper ballots was to blame.
"It was nothing they did," Streater said of Election Systems and Software.
You would think that they would test these things before they put the future of the free world in it's hands.
what programmer - can code addition.
Well, how many machines had the bad software nationwide?
can = can't
ping
Back when I was in college, there was a student vote for or against the Vietnam war. When the results came in, the computer results said that the Liberal Arts College students were in favor of the war and the Ag school students were against it.
The Professor in charge said there must be a mistake in the program and changed the "for" votes to "against" votes and vice-versa without bothering to check the program. I just shook my head!
I can't remember if input was by punch card or optical paper ballots.
Hmmmmm. I wonder if ......
Where ever the software was....This needs to be looked into. I hate to feel this way but something just doesn't seem right about this election.
The machines gave 1,900 of Allen's votes to Webb. Luckily, they caught it today and corrected it. At least the numbers got a lot closer for the unofficial recount.
bump
The 14 missing smart cards were never found as far as I know. I haven't seen a thread on it.
I'm sure he messed up some mundane detail.
dont see the dems worry about what voter problems please no that the dems won who cares it is only if a republican wins that all of a sudden it is a big deal
What?
LOL! I thought that too..Snowbird friends of Jesse Ventura or something.
That's what I told my husband. It's like up was down, and down was up. It doesn't "smell" right. Now is not the time to vote democrat, no matter what the issue. It's economical, immigrant, and terror suicide.
My husband isn't a political buff. He listens to NPR on the way home from work. Sometimes he even watches MSNBC. He also listens to a little Rush at lunch. He's a good indicator of current trends because he stands back from it all. He's usually right, too. He said the Republicans will keep both House and Senate. I easily agreed.
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