Reply #33: ..and some more

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2002 Optech Eagle Wayne County, North Carolina. A programming error caused the Optech Eagle optical scan machines to skip several thousand party-line votes, both Republican and Democrat. Correcting the error turned up 5,500 more votes and reversed the outcome for the House District 11 state representative race.

Muskegon, Michigan. Optical scan machines failed to detect 2% of the votes for Township Clerk because the marks were too light. Originally, the machines reported that challenger Kris Tabler had
lost to incumbent Jim Nielsen, 791-786. 55

The ensuing canvassing process, which compares the results from the precinct reports to the results produced by the ballot-counting machines, found the same result.

But Tabler paid for a recount in all seven township precincts, and the Muskegon County Board of Canvassers spent Wednesday, Thursday and Friday inspecting the ballots by hand. When they finished, the result was startlingly different. Tabler won the election over Nielsen by two votes, 804-802. Jerry Young, the candidate who finished a distant third, received 258 votes in the recount.

Overall, the recount revealed the existence of 39 more votes cast in the clerk's race than the original count did.

2004 Arizona. The original totals for State Representative in District 20 showed Anton Orlich in the lead over John McComish by four votes, and the close margin required a
recount. The optical scan recount found nearly 500 additional votes for the five candidates in the race and changed the outcome, giving McComish the lead by 13 points.

2004 central count Sandusky County, Ohio. An election turnout of 131% tipped off the election officials that the optical scanners had been adding phantom votes to the totals. Officials concluded that ballots had been counted twice and speculated that some ballots had been fed through machine more than once.

2004 , Wisconsin. Four and a half months after the election, a consulting firm discovered that ES&S had programmed the optical scanners incorrectly, failing to account for partisan elections.

That failure meant that the votes of everyone who voted straight ticket - anyone who voted only for candidates of a single party - were not counted. In all, about 600 of 2,256 ballots cast were not
counted, Strama said.
... Medford and Taylor County officials have been told by Nebraska-based Election Systems & Software that the city will be reimbursed for the costs of setting up the vote-counting machine in the
fall because the program was faulty. A spokeswoman said the company takes full responsibility for the error.

2005 Medford, Wisconsin. Inaccurate programming by ES&S caused all straight-party votes to be lost, affecting approximately 27% of the ballots.

"There's really nothing voters can do at this point," said Kevin Kennedy, the executive secretary of the State Elections Board.



Jacksonackson County, Indiana New ES&S voting machine equipment is not interfacing with older odels, forcing workers to manually count votes in each machine in each precinct.

“ES&S has been here reading the packs, and they are having problems getting them merged together with the power packs from the Eagle machine, which is the optical scan we’ve always had,” Jackson
County Clerk Sarah Benter said Tuesday night.
Because of the problems caused by the machines, Benter and the Jackson County Election Board were left with no alternative but to count results from each machine in each precinct, a process that didn’t
wrap up until nearly 4:30 a.m. today.
“I’m not sure whether it was a software problem or a coding problem, but I certainly hope they’ll figure it out and fix it by November,” Benter said. “We had to count everything by hand, and I know
we’re not the only county encountering it. I know Clark County is southern Indiana are experiencing the same problems.”

May 2006 ES&S Optical scan Phillips County, Arkansas. Tabulators, with flawed ballot programming furnished by ES&S, mistook 432 Democratic votes for Republican and fail to count them in the Democratic primary.

Several days after the Election Commission certified that race and Crumbly and Willis began campaigning for the June 13 runoff, commission staff discovered that 432 votes cast at Allen Temple
in Phillips County had mistakenly been counted as Republican ballots, effectively nullifying them.

The malfunctioning ballot tabulating machine was programmed by Election Systems & Software, the Omaha, Neb.-based company that in November signed a $ 15 million contract to provide election
equipment to Arkansas counties.