[IP] Computer Loses 4,500 Votes (AP)
Begin forwarded message:
From: Gregory Hicks <ghicks@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: November 5, 2004 10:22:56 PM EST
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Computer Loses 4,500 Votes (AP)
Reply-To: Gregory Hicks <ghicks@xxxxxxxxxxx>
03:20 PM Nov. 04, 2004 PT
JACKSONVILLE, North Carolina -- More than 4,500 votes have been lost in
one North Carolina county because officials believed a computer that
stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did.
Scattered other problems may change results in races around the state.
Local officials said UniLect, the maker of the county's electronic
voting system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500
votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes.
Expecting the greater capacity, the county used only one unit during
the early voting period. "If we had known, we would have had the units
to handle the votes," said Sue Verdon, secretary of the county election
board.
Officials said 3,005 early votes were stored, but 4,530 were lost.
Jack Gerbel, president and owner of Dublin, California-based UniLect,
said Thursday that the county's elections board was given incorrect
information. There is no way to retrieve the missing data, he said.
"That is the situation and it's definitely terrible," he said.
In a letter to county officials, he blamed the mistake on confusion
over which model of the voting machines was in use in Carteret County.
But he also noted that the machines flash a warning message when there
is no more room for storing ballots.
"Evidently, this message was either ignored or overlooked," he wrote.
County election officials were meeting Thursday with Gary Bartlett,
executive director of the State Board of Elections, and did not
immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.
This isn't the first time that North Carolina experienced this problem.
In early voting for the 2002 general election, touch-screen voting
machines made by a different company, Election Systems & Software,
failed to record ballots cast by 436 voters.
The company said the problem was a software glitch that caused the
machines to believe the memory cards were full when they actually
weren't. Like UniLect, ES&S claimed that the machines flashed a warning
to voters telling them the memory was full but it did not prevent
voters from continuing to cast ballots, something that critics say any
voting machine should do.
This year's lost votes didn't appear to change the outcome of county
races, but that wasn't the issue for Alecia Williams, who voted on one
of the final days of the early voting period.
"The point is not whether the votes would have changed things, it's
that they didn't get counted at all," Williams said.
Two statewide races remained undecided Thursday, for superintendent of
public instruction, where the two candidates are about 6,700 votes
apart, and for agriculture commissioner, where they are only hundreds
of votes apart.
How those two races might be affected by problems in individual
counties was uncertain. The state still must tally more than 73,000
provisional ballots, plus those from four counties that have not yet
submitted their provisional ballots, said Johnnie McLean, deputy
director of the state elections board.
Nationwide, only scattered e-voting problems were reported, though
roughly 40 million people cast digital ballots, voting equipment makers
said.
Kim Zetter contributed to this report.
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I am perfectly capable of learning from my mistakes. I will surely
learn a great deal today.
"A democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding on what to have for
lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the results of the
decision." - Benjamin Franklin
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they
be properly armed." --Alexander Hamilton
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