EXAMPLES OF ELECTION PROBLEMS

“For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.” -Alice Kahn

Although Election Company officials each insist that their respective electronic voting systems are flawless and accurate within infinitesimal degrees (“under 1% error rate”), actual practice over the years has shown otherwise. In Iowa, in 2000 National Election, 300 ballots were fed into an optical scan machine in one county, which then reported 4 million votes. In 2003, Indiana voting machines count one county at 144,000 votes when there were only 5352 votes (2500% error!). Arizona, 1994, computer error evaporates 826 votes from a Tucson precinct accounting for a 66% error. In Dallas in 1998, a programming error in the tabulator missed over 41,000 votes. In a Texas primary, one county had but 500 ballots, yet the machine counted 800 votes (60% error). The companies’ sales reps refer to these “anomalies” as hitting ‘speed bumps’… They’re obviously not tallied in when figuring that advertised’ under 1% error rate.’

Scripps Howard News Service recently did a post election study, sampling 12,000 ballots. They found that nearly 1 in 10 ballots in the study did not show a vote for President in November, 2004… or whose votes for President never registered. This would extrapolate out to 12 million voters who went to the polls without casting a vote for the President. Compiled below is but a small sampling of the tens of thousands http://www.votersunite.org/takeaction/2004problemsampling.htm of election problems that have been reported to date.

November 2004 - Ohio:

Mahoning County - Machine registers negative 25 million votes early on Election Day!

Mahoning - A dozen machines just freeze. Twenty to thirty ES&S Touch Screens needed recalibration during the voting process due to votes going to the opposing candidate voters selected. The actual administrative password was reported publicly on the ES&S website as "1111". http://savethevote.com/issues/glitches.htm

Mahoning - Touch Screens in as many as 16 precincts awarded unknown numbers of improper votes to President Bush before the error was caught.

Mahoning- Baskets full of uncounted votes reported by County observers.

Columbus - An estimated 5000 to 15,000 voters left without casting ballots because of long lines. Many Democratic districts were supplied with only one half the machines that they’d had during the Primaries, despite warnings of the biggest voter turnout ever.

Franklin County - 77 Voting machines broke down. They used older Touch Screens. Long lines due to insufficient numbers of machines reported, despite the fact that 39 of the machines http://www.votersunite.org/article.asp?id=4197 ordered ended up unused and warehoused.

Franklin - where only 638 people had voted -- according to the Tabulator program, Bush received 4258 votes to Kerry’s 260. (The actual Bush vote was determined to be 365.)**see below

Miami County- Over 13,000 votes appear in the Bush column after all the precincts had already reported in. (See TECHNOLOGY; How GEMS Works- “the Witching Hour”)

Cuyahoga County - 10,000 voters’ registrations were “botched” by the Board of Elections and they could not vote. 8000 provisional ballots were ruled “invalid.”

Cuyahoga - Voter reports of paper ballots pre-punched (for Bush).

Cuyahoga - One precinct (4F) predominantly African American and Democratic, gave Peroutka, the ultra-Conservative Constitutional Party candidate, nearly as many votes as Kerry (Kerry 290, Petroutka 215). Petroutka strongly opposed Affirmative action, Abortion, Federal funding for Health Care, and supported the death penalty as well as supporting lower taxes for the wealthy. Two other precincts had 3^rd party candidates receiving the bulk of the votes… in Cleveland.

Mercer County - On one machine alone, 289 voters cast ballots, but only 51 votes were recorded that voted for President. It appears 7% of the entire County also did NOT vote for President

Montgomery County - In two precincts there was no Presidential vote recorded on 25% of the ballots. One tabulator credited 600 straight Democratic votes to Libertarian candidates

Warren County - (the county which produced near 1/3 of Bush’s Ohio margin) --The Center where tabulation (vote count) took place was “locked down” by Republican election officials election night citing “FBI Terrorism threat” (which both the FBI and Homeland Security deny having issued). Bi-partisan observers and even the AP reporter were refused admission as the Presidential votes were counted under secret lockdown.

Sandusky - 2600 Ballots got counted twice

Kenyon College - Students waited up to 10 hours in lines to cast a ballot due to machine shortage

Lucas County - Diebold technicians dismantled and reprogrammed the central tabulators after the election, and before the recount.

Hocking County - Per affidavit of County election employee: Post election and pre-recount, a Triad technician dismantled the central tabulator, replaced parts, modified software, and posted on the wall a self described “cheat sheet” for election officials, to prompt them to match each precincts vote totals in the recount to those the technician had devised on the sheet . Officials were told it would be in “code” so as not to be obvious.

Auglaize County - Oct. 21^st, 2004, http://www.theeveningleader.com/articles/2004/11/05/news/news.01.txtn Board of Election Deputy Director, Ken Nuss, reports that an ES&S employee violated election protocol via unauthorized access to the main tabulation computer the weekend of October 16, 2004. The date of his letter, October 21, he is suspended from his job for one day -- and then promptly resigned that very same day. On November 6, Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell’s office said they were too busy counting provisional ballots to investigate at that time...

**It was later determined that Franklin County’s problem that gave Bush the thousands of extra votes was that the laptop had been completing another task just as the numbers from that precinct were being fed into it. Thus, the laptop didn’t “receive the data as fast as it was sent,” said the elections board report. In a classic Deus ex Machinas illustration, on February 13, 2005 -- The Cleveland Plain Dealer excused the “glitch” with this comforting analogy...

”Just like any overworked and distracted human, the machine was trying to do too much at once.” -- Cleveland Plain Dealer

2004 - Florida:

Broward County - Machines count backwards after reaching 32,500 votes (same problem as in 2000, yet they were never fixed).

Broward - At least 21 ES&S voting machines malfunctioned and were replaced.

6 Counties reported 189,000 more votes for President Bush than there are voters. Volusia County - A reported record number of Diebold memory card failures (59 cards) - more than the other Florida Counties combined.

Volusia - After one week of early voting, some memory cards reported ZERO votes.

Volusia - Out of the 170 precincts, 60 reported problems, mostly in East Volusia which is predominantly African American and elderly people.

Daytona Beach - Memory card failure wipes out 13,244 votes from early voting.

Touch screens - Voters would press Kerry and repeatedly get Bush instead

UC Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Study of November 18, 2004 http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/ - Results indicate electronic voting machine irregularities by both ES&S and Sequoia company products may have awarded between 130,000 to 260,000 excess votes to President Bush in Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Broward Counties, Florida. Researchers concluded that the “association between electronic voting and increased support for President Bush is impossible to overlook” in these Florida counties. The media fail to report the results.

2000 - Volusia - Gore’s vote count on Diebold machines went DOWN resulting in a total of MINUS 16,022 votes! Diebold blamed a faulty memory card which IT scientists doubted. Later, internal leaked Diebold memos revealed that there were two separate memory cards used. One hour apart... On election night, Diebold’s GEMS tabulators shaved 19,000 off Gore’s votes, gave Socialist candidate an added 9000, and Bush a bonus 4000 votes.

California:

San Diego Primaries – Over half the Diebold electronic machines malfunctioned.

2003 Governor Recall election: Audit of Diebold reveals uncertified software installed in their voting machines in all 17 Counties. Both State and Federal certifications found to have been neglected... using uncertified equipment throughout the state a major violation of Election Code -- Hence the $2,600,000 settlement. http://www.ag.ca.gov/newsalerts/2004/04-130.htm

Elsewhere:

Other instances found in Georgia, Maryland, Alabama, North Carolina, Texas, Oklahoma, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, Washington include: unusable machines shoved aside at a one in five ratio; inexplicable migration of thousands of votes from one candidate to another after polls close; memory overloads; tabulators that just stopped counting; thousands of votes vanishing. (North Carolina http://www.ballotintegrity.org/DCForumID44/4.html - Kerry “lost” 22,000 votes, and a Touch Screen programming error erased 4439 votes that simply never got counted; another County, over 11,000 more votes for President than voters; Diebold tabulators ate 12,000 votes; and nine counties had vote counts electronically doubled in error.) There’s more machines apparently “counting backwards” after polls closed, and in Texas, 2002, http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/s00064.htm three Republican candidates in Comal County garner the exact same number of votes -- 18,181! It was written off as coincidence.

The Secretary of State in New Mexico ignored a 3 inch thick book of complaints from the 2000 election. Then, in 2004 -- Sandoval County was forced to shut down machines due to “electrical problems.” Half of the states 12,000 provisional ballots ended up discarded. The New Mexico Optical Scanners seemed to have an inappropriate affection for George W. Bush. He carried every single precinct there that was counted by them.

New Mexico actually seems to be “haunted” when it comes to elections.... given their recurring problems with what’s called “Phantom Votes” --when the number of votes recorded exceeds the number of ballots cast. The 2000 election yielded nearly 1000 Phantoms in New Mexico, and in 2004, almost 2100 Phantoms voted statewide above the number of actual voters. They were haunting the polls in 15 of the state’s 33 total Counties this past election, giving new meaning to the state’s nickname; “The Land of Enchantment”...

11 Pages of Voter Problems reported http://www.votersunite.org/electionproblems.asp

State by State reports (see OHIO) http://shadowbox.i8.com/machines.htm