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Evoting Problems in Ohio

Posted by michael on from the what-me-worry dept.

deus_X_machina writes "The Columbus Dispatch is reporting that a computer error involving one voting-machine cartridge gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in a Gahanna precinct. Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, says the cartridge was retested yesterday and there were no problems. He couldn't explain why the computer reader malfunctioned."

4 of 288 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How was the correct count derived? by ugmoe · · Score: 3, Informative
    Yesterday, they rechecked the removable cartridge and got 115 Bush votes.

    Yesterday, they checked the non-removable memory banks in the voting machine and to 115 Bush votes.

    Since the non-removable memory banks matched the removable cardridge, they used that as the offical Bush vote from the machine.

    The other 2 machines had a total of 250 Bush votes.

    Adding 250 to 115 gives 365 Bush votes total for the precinct.

  2. Vote count problem in San Francisco (Not Diebold) by ugmoe · · Score: 3, Informative
    http://apnews.myway.com/article/20041105/D865R1DO0 .html

    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.

    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.

  3. The faulty machines were not Diebold by ugmoe · · Score: 5, Informative
    http://apnews.myway.com/article/20041105/D865SVN80 .html 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's total should have been recorded as 365.

    Franklin is the only Ohio county to use Danaher Controls Inc.'s ELECTronic 1242, an older-style touchscreen voting system. Danaher did not immediately return a message for comment.

  4. Mainstream media? by metroid+composite · · Score: 3, Informative

    Okay, turned on the news wondering what kind of spin CNN would have on this. Didn't come up. So I started doing searches....

    CNN
    Foxnews
    BBC
    CBC
    Aljzeera's search engine is not working properly today; oh well.
    Ohio News Now

    Anyone care to tell me why this simply isn't being reported at all? I've never heard of the Columbus Dispatch. Nor have I heard of the Washington Dispatch (one other place I've seen run the story).

    Is it too new to be picked up?
    Is it not considered newsworthy as just correcting a routine error?
    Is it being censored? And if so then why by every news company including those outside of US juristiction?

    Forgive me for being a bit skeptical on this story, but I do tend to assume that vote talliers can spot an order of magnitude error.