|
Electronic Voting Machines
|
VERIFIED VOTING NEW MEXICO |
Elections are always complicated and difficult to run accurately. Under non-electronic procedures, ballot boxes get lost or even stolen, or get locked with keys inside, and hand miscounting is endemic. In 1996, Bernalillo County accidentally sent a voting machine cartridge to Santa Fe, and also found a box of 6,888 uncounted ballots in a county warehouse. In Dona Ana County, the correction of a 500-vote error in addition swung New Mexico's vote to Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore a week after the 2000 election. Voting by machine also requires safeguards. Following is a nationwide sampling of the many problems experienced with the new electronic voting machines
2000 Presidential Election In Volusia County FL, Diebold uploaded a "replacement" set of vote totals that cost Gore 16,022 votes; an alert poll worker noticed the Gore vote going down and blew the whistle. Elsewhere in Florida, brand new voting machines lost more than 100,000 votes due to a software error.
2002 Florida Gubernatorial Nomination Race Janet Reno noted that in South FL precincts where she was strong, ES&S machines were recording no votes in the governor's race. In some poll sites where there were over 1,000 votes cast in other races, there were no votes for governor.
2002, Wellington Florida In a city runoff election, the winner beat the opponent by only four votes, but 78 electronic ballots were blank. Election officials defended machines, saying these voters came to the polls and then chose not to vote in the only race on the ballot!
Middlesex Cty, NJ A Sequoia machine was taken out of service after 65 votes had been cast without registering a choice for either of the candidates.
2002, Palm Beach Cty FL 3% of ballots in city council election went unrecorded on the machines.
2002, Scurry Cty TX Following landslide wins for two Republicans on optical-scanned ballots, county clerk held two manual recounts and one electronic recount (using flown-in replacement chip) that resulted in Democratic candidate landslide victories.
4/02, Johnson Cty Kansas Election officials reported that Diebold machines had under- and over-reported hundreds of votes.
8/02, Clay City Kansas EV machines reported Jerry Mayo lost in a squeaker with 48% of the vote; a hand recount showed he won by a landslide.
10/02, Wake County NC Wwhen poll workers compared the number of early voters to that recorded by ES&S touch-screen machines, the figures didn't match. For the general election, County officials returned to using optical-scan machines that produce a paper trail.
11/02, Cherry Hill, NJ Voters were turned away when it was discovered that 96% of the voting machines couldn't register votes for Mayor.
11/03, Boone County Indiana MicroVote Machines counted 144,000 votes cast in a county that has fewer than 19,000 registered voters.
11/03, Fairfax Cty VA spent $3.5 million to buy 1,000 touch-screen machines and experienced severe malfunctioning, prompting Republicans to sue on grounds that ad hoc "unsupervised" repairs were made to 9 machines during the election. Montgomery Cty MD had a similar disaster in 2002.
2003, Lake Cty IL No votes were recorded in a precinct where the Dem candidate voted for himself.
2003, Washington DC Voters in 3 precincts reported that in voting by machine for candidate Thompson, an X appeared but vanished after a few seconds. Officials tested one such machine and founded that it seemed to subtract one out of every 100 Thompson votes. She lost by 1%.
2004, Palm Beach and Broward Counties, FL Touch-screen machines reported 134 blank ballots cast in a special election for a state House seat where the margin of victory was 12 votes. The second-place finisher charged that faulty machines may have cost him the election. "People do not go to the polls in a one-issue election and not vote," he said. But with no paper trail, there was no way to check.
11/02, Florida Governor race In one precinct, voters reported touching screen for the Democrat candidate and seeing it record for Republican Jeb Bush. In another polling place, poll workers kept count of 713 voters, but the EV machines counted 749.
11/02, Dallas TXBecause of misalignment, 18 touch-screen machines registered Republican votes even though Democratic screen buttons were pushed. Unknown how many other machines were affected. Democratic Party went to court over this.
3/5/02, San Luis Obispo Cty CA At 3:31 pm on Election Day, Diebold machines in 57 polling places simultaneously "called home" to corporate headquarters and reported the mid-afternoon tally, which went up on a Diebold website in time for interested partisans to mobilize their voters.
11/02, Comal County, Texas State Races Republican Jeff Wentworth won Senate race with 18,181 votes, Republican Carter Casteel won House seat with 18,181 votes, Republican Danny Scheel won judgeship with 18,181 votes. Nobody thought to ask for a new chip.
Georgia, 2002 - In the first state to use nearly all-electronic voting, there were six big Republican upsets. Diebold applied software patches to all machines just before the election, without inspection by election officials.
| Poll Results | Vote Results | Comments | |
| U.S. Senate Race | |||
| Dem. Sen. Max Cleland | 49% | 46% | No pre-election poll predicted loss incumbent (Cleland) |
| Rep. Saxby Chambliss | 44% | 53% | |
| Governor Race | |||
| Dem. Roy Barns | 48% | 45% | No pre-election poll predicted loss incumbent (Barnes) |
| Rep. Sonny Perdue | 39% | 52% | Perdue is first Republican governor since the end of the Civil War. |
| Minnesota Senate Race, 2002 | |||
| Dem. Walter Mondale | 47% | 47% | No check of chip, no request for new chip |
| Rep. Norm Coleman | 39% | 50% |
Nebraska U.S. Senate Race, 1996 & 2002