Glitch gave Bush extra votes in Ohio
Friday, November 5, 2004 Posted: 4:15 PM EST (2115 GMT)



Poll workers in San Jose, California, set up electronic voting machines on Tuesday.
     

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.

Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.

Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch.

State and county election officials did not immediately respond to requests by The Associated Press for more details about the voting system and its vendor, and whether the error, if repeated elsewhere in Ohio, could have affected the outcome.

Bush won the state by more than 136,000 votes, according to unofficial results, and Kerry conceded the election on Wednesday after acknowledging that 155,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted in Ohio would not change the result. (Full Ohio results)

The Secretary of State's Office said Friday it could not revise Bush's total until the county reported the error.

The Ohio glitch is among a handful of computer troubles that have emerged since Tuesday's elections. (Touchscreen voting troubles reported)

In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. And in San Francisco, a malfunction with custom voting software could delay efforts to declare the winners of four races for county supervisor.

In the Ohio precinct in question, the votes are recorded onto a cartridge. On one of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred in the recording process, Damschroder said. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred.

Damschroder said people who had seen poll results on the election board's Web site called to point out the discrepancy. The error would have been discovered when the official count for the election is performed later this month, he said.

The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race on the machine.

Workers checked the cartridge against memory banks in the voting machine and each showed that 115 people voted for Bush on that machine. With the other machines, the total for Bush in the precinct added up to 365 votes.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a glitch occurred with software designed for the city's new "ranked-choice voting," in which voters list their top three choices for municipal offices. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes outright, voters' second and third-place preferences are then distributed among candidates who weren't eliminated in the first round. (E-vote goes smoothly, but experts skeptical)

When the San Francisco Department of Elections tried a test run on Wednesday of the program that does the redistribution, some of the votes didn't get counted and skewed the results, director John Arntz said.

"All the information is there," Arntz said. "It's just not arriving the way it was supposed to."

A technician from the Omaha, Neb. company that designed the software, Election Systems & Software Inc., was working to diagnose and fix the problem.

This was on CNN.com.

I already read this, it gave Bush 3,000+ extra votes, WHICH WILL BE TAKEN OFF.

A point that I shouldn't even have to make:

1. BUSH STILL WINS, even after taking off the extra votes he still leads by over 130,000.  Sheesh, it is over.

I personally give up, I knew if Bush won this election the democrats would be yelling stolen, no matter by how much Bush won, so I don't really care to hear it.

The point is it never should have happened and it shouldn't take a computer expert to
correct a glitch thereby investing in that person the sole responsiblity of computing the
tally.  Without a paper trail no one can verify the accuracy of the count.  That is something
that should bother every voter.

The point is it never should have happened and it shouldn't take a computer expert to
correct a glitch thereby investing in that person the sole responsiblity of computing the
tally.  Without a paper trail no one can verify the accuracy of the count.  That is something
that should bother every voter.


On a side note, you do know that a computer problem gave Kerry an extra 2,000 votes in Pennsylvania don't you?  Why is no one complaining?  Simple, the republicans don't whine as much and it wouldn't change anything.

I don't doubt there were ballot hijinks, but the issue is a non-starter this time around. Bush won.  That's the fact Dems must deal with.  Carping about ballot fraud won't go anywhere.  As that slimeball Hugh Hewitt titled his Republican BS book, If It's Not Close They Can't Cheat.  Never mind the disgusting implications of this coming from a right-winger, it does describe the task before the Dems.  They need to crush Republicans on the issues.  They need to defeat the phony populism of Christo-fascism with REAL populism of economics--labor issues, kitchen table issues. AND THEY CAN DO IT!!!  It's just a matter of willingness to defy the corporate paymasters and tell the simple truth to the American people.

The repubs don't care because in the end it has all come out in their favor.  If
the situation was reversed I am sure they would speak up and well they should.
Like I said, we should never have to depend on the word of one person and the
absence of a paper trail.  It is ugly policy open to abuse.

On a side note, you do know that a computer problem gave Kerry an extra 2,000 votes in Pennsylvania don't you? Why is no one complaining? Simple, the republicans don't whine as much and it wouldn't change anything.

Yep - I am: voting software is piss-easy to write.  Bulletproof voting software is straightforward - a few stories so far of glitches giving a couple of thousand votes here or there (and in one case -25,000 (yes, that's minus 25k votes)) should mean that the companies concerned should NEVER be given another contract EVER AGAIN.  Whatever they were paid should be demanded back: it's made a ridicule of the most important election in the world this year.  FFS, HOW DIFFICULT IS IT TO GET A COMPUTER TO COUNT?

Ignoring that an extrapolation of these "glitches" could affect the result... hell, it wouldn't surprise me if Nader was elected 'cause of a software bug the way these things are going.  Ignoring also that the CEO of Diebold promised Ohio to Bush... which was just what he delivered.  Who knows what the votes cast actually were... and looking at reactions over there, who really cares?

Another question for you: how come the exit polls in regions that had paper ballots were fairly accurate, but in regions using unverifiable voting machines (i.e. ones that didn't create a paper record that could be checked post hoc) the exit polls were wildly out?

This type of thing is what scares me about electronic voting.  I say we stick with the ballot system. 

This type of thing is what scares me about electronic voting. I say we stick with the ballot system.

Electronic voting per se isn't a problem: the problem comes with "commercial in confidence" agreements which mean that the voters doesn't get to see the code (not that all voters would understand it, but a wide enough variety of people would to ensure that there's nothing underhand in the code itself), and a verifiable paper trail is an essential.  IMO the best way of doing this would be for the voting machine to confirm a vote by printing out a ballot with the right box filled in - this would get checked by the voter and posted into a ballot box.  A random sample of results would be checked against the ballot boxes, and a discrepancy of ONE would be enough to cause an investigation... none of this "a few thousand here, a few thousand there" complacency.

Blackboxvoting.com is a worthwhile site... a while back I found some interesting discussions about what electronic voting should include, and avoid.  Strangely enough, a company promising to deliver a state to one of the candidates wasn't one of the criteria ;)

blackboxvoting.org seems slightly less techie and more worked-up about this... probably worth a look if you're feeling paranoid, 'cause after all, it ain't paranoia if they really are out to get you 8)