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Ohio error boosted bush Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/nation/10112363.htm?1chttp://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/nation/10112363.htm?1c
Posted on Sat, Nov. 06, 2004
Ohio error boosted Bush a bit
In a precinct where only 638 voted, the unofficial count showed him receiving 4,258 votes.
By John McCarthy
Associated Press
COLUMBUS, Ohio - An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in a suburb of Columbus, elections officials said.
Unofficial results in Franklin County showed Bush drawing 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in the city of Gahanna. Records show that only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. Bush's total should have been recorded as 365.
Bush won Ohio by more than 136,000 votes, according to unofficial results, and Kerry conceded the election Wednesday after saying that 155,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted in the state would not change the result.
Correcting the Franklin County error also would not change the 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 touch-screen voting system. Danaher did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
In the Gahanna precinct, the votes are recorded to eight memory sites, including a removable cartridge, according to the Verified Voting Foundation, an e-voting watchdog group. After voting ends, either the cartridge is transported to a tabulation facility or its data are sent by modem.
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.
Around the country, other voting glitches were reported, including:
In South Florida, a proposal to let voters decide whether to allow slot machines at racetracks and jai alai frontons won approval after elections officials discovered 79,000 absentee votes missed in an electronic tally on Election Day. The vast majority of those votes, added late in Broward County, approved the initiative. That swamped the narrow lead opponents had clung to since Tuesday. State and local elections officials said the ballot oversight was due to human error in computer programming.
In Colorado, a county that switched this year from voter punch cards to an electronic scanner system still had hundreds of uncounted ballots yesterday, holding up a congressional race and the balance of the state legislature. Boulder County's new optical scanners that read voters' marks on a paper ballot were rejecting improperly marked ballots, slowing the tally. County officials hoped to have final results before the end of the week.
In North Carolina, about 4,530 votes in Carteret County were lost because officials mistakenly believed that a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. County officials said UniLect Corp. of California, maker of the voting system, told them each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005. UniLect president Jack Gerbel said that the county's elections board was given incorrect information and that there was no way to retrieve the missing data.
In San Francisco, a malfunction with custom voting software could delay efforts to declare the winners of four races for county supervisor. A technician from the Omaha, Neb., company that designed the software, Election Systems & Software Inc., was working to diagnose and fix the problem.
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