Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes

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Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes

 

By JOHN McCARTHY, Associated Press Writer

 

COLUMBUS, Ohio - An error with an electronic voting system gave

President Bush (news - web sites) 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 (news - web sites)'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.

 

Bush won the state by more than 136,000 votes, according to unofficial

results, and Kerry conceded the election on Wednesday after saying

that 155,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted in Ohio would not

change the result.

 

Deducting the erroneous Bush votes from his total could not change the

election's outcome, and there were no signs of other errors in Ohio's

electronic machines, said Carlo LoParo, spokesman for Ohio Secretary

of State Kenneth Blackwell.

 

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.

 

Sean Greene, research director with the nonpartisan Election Reform

Information Project, said that while the glitch appeared minor " that

could change if more of these stories start coming out. "

 

In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost in this

election 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 to eight

memory locations, including a removable cartridge, according to

Verified Voting Foundation, an e-voting watchdog group. After voting

ends, the cartridge is either transported to a tabulation facility or

its data sent via modem.

 

Kimball Brace, president of the consulting firm Election Data

Services, said it's possible the fault lies with the software that

tallies the votes from individual cartridges rather than the machines

or the cartridges themselves.

 

Either way, he said, such tallying software ought to have a way to

ensure that the totals don't exceed the number of voters.

 

County officials did not return calls seeking details.

 

Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of

Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch that on one of the three

machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred when its cartridge

was plugged into a reader and generated a faulty number. 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.

 

Other electronic machines used in Ohio do not use the type of computer

cartridge involved in the error, state officials say.

 

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.