From
Wired News
Florida Primary Recount Reveals Grave Voting Problems One Month Before Presidential Election
Date of Publication: 10.07.08. Time of Publication: 5:00 pm.
Kim Zetter
Security
A month of primary recounts in the election battleground of Palm Beach County, Florida, has twice flipped the winner in a local judicial race and revealed grave problems in the county’s election infrastructure, including thousands of misplaced ballots and vote tabulation machines that are literally unable to produce the same results twice.
Experts say the brew of administrative bungling and mysterious technological failures raises new and troubling questions ... Voting advocates are fearful that problems here — and perhaps in other election hot spots — could trigger a replay of the disputed 2000 election.
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At issue is an Aug. 26 primary election in which officials discovered, during a recount of a close judicial race, that more than 3,400 ballots had mysteriously disappeared after they were initially counted on election day. The recount a week later, minus the missing ballots, flipped the results of the race to a different winner.
The county eventually found the missing ballots after a prolonged hunt. But it also turned up an additional 200 or so ballots that officials never knew were missing and that were never counted in the original tabulation of the race. A recently completed recount — with all of the ballots — has restored victory to the original winner. But the month-long saga has left voters and state officials exasperated and distrustful of the ability of county officials to run a competent general election in November. More important, it’s also uncovered perplexing problems in some of the county’s high-speed optical-scan tabulation machines, made by Sequoia Voting Systems. The machines flunked reliability tests prompted by the recount — producing different results for the same batch of ballots.
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Florida election law requires a recount when a margin of victory is one-half of 1 percent or less. But when officials conducted the recount a week after the primary, they discovered they had 3,478 fewer ballots than when they’d counted them on election day. ...
The county planned to certify the recount results, despite the absence of nearly 3,500 ballots ... until state election officials stepped in and said they would not accept the results in that race until the county found the missing ballots.
A hunt for the ballots ensued, and was so successful that officials found an additional 227 ballots ... All of the ballots were discovered in boxes in the county’s tabulation center. Officials blamed the overlooked ballots on the disorderly way in which the recount was conducted, and the high number of ballots cast in the election.
On that last point, it’s worth noting that about 100,000 primary ballots were cast in the county. The county is expecting more than half-a-million ballots to be cast Nov. 4. The ballot in November will also be two pages long ...
After the missing and new ballots were discovered, a court ordered a second machine recount of the judicial race. The second recount confirmed the initial election results ... But this time his margin of victory was 115 votes, up from the 17 votes ...
But even that wasn’t the final score.
As mentioned above, Florida law requires a recount if the margin of victory in an election is one-half of 1 percent or less. That recount is only a machine recount, not a manual recount. However, if that recount results in a margin of victory that is one-quarter of 1 percent or less, then county officials must manually examine ballots that were spit out by the recount machines as being unreadable for having an undervote or overvote in the disputed race. They do this to determine if the machine missed legitimate votes ...
So Palm Beach County proceeded to do a manual examination of some 12,000 ballots that the optical-scan machines had rejected. Officials found legitimate votes that were marked clearly and correctly and should have been read by the machines. They also found other ballots that were not marked correctly and therefore couldn’t be read by the machines, but still indicated a clear choice by the voter.
In the wake of that count, ... the ... margin of victory had gone down from 115 votes to 58 votes. Then a new surprise emerged.
Election officials discovered that an additional 159 ballots from 54 precincts may have had valid votes on them that never made it into the tabulation.
They determined this by looking at reports that each voting precinct produced on election day. Those reports indicated the number of ballots that the precinct-based optical-scan machines had flagged for undervotes or overvotes. Officials discovered that the numbers of undervotes and overvotes didn’t add up to the total numbers that county election officials had calculated after the ballots were run through the county-based high-speed optical-scan machines.
This raised questions about whether optical-scan machines were erroneously rejecting legitimate votes as undervotes, or whether election officials had simply misrecorded the numbers or mistakenly placed legitimate ballots into piles of undervote ballots.
So county officials decided to ask a judge to let them conduct a third machine recount of some 3,000 ballots to see if they could find the mysterious 159 ballots that were throwing off the numbers. Additional legitimate votes were found in this round; at the end, ... the ... margin of victory was now 61 votes ...
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Palm Beach County was using new optical-scan machines that it recently purchased from Sequoia Voting Systems for $5.5 million. The machines replaced paperless touchscreen machines that the county had purchased in 2002, which were bought to replace punch card machines that were involved in the 2000 election debacle. ... The county used one model of Sequoia’s scanners at precincts on election day, but used different high-speed scanners in the election office headquarters to conduct the recount.
So on Wednesday last week, the county conducted a test on a random sampling of its eight high-speed machines. It scanned about 262 ballots that had previously been rejected by machines for having undervotes or overvotes, and that had then been examined by hand to determine if the machine’s reading of the ballots was accurate.
Only two of the county’s eight high-speed machines were tested. ...
Officials expected the machines would reject the same ballots again. But that didn’t happen. During a first test of 160 ballots, the machines accepted three of them. In a second test of 102 ballots, the machines accepted 13 of them, and rejected the others. When the same ballots were run through the machines again, 90 of the ballots were accepted. ...
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Because of the problems in these tests, a second round of testing was conducted last Friday on six precinct-based optical scan machines out of a thousand machines the state uses. ...
According to the Sun-Sentinel, the six machines functioned properly in that test. ...
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Neither Palm Beach County officials nor Florida’s secretary of state have responded to several calls for comment. Sequoia Voting Systems also has not responded to a call to explain why some of its high-speed machines rejected legitimate ballots. ...
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Douglas Jones, a professor of computer science at the University of Iowa who has consulted with a number of states on voting machine issues, said the problem with the machines is likely inconsistent calibration among machines.
Jones blamed the federal voting system standards by which voting systems are tested and certified. He says the federal standards don’t set a threshold for what should be an acceptable number of scanning mistakes and calibration decisions are thus left to the companies that make them.
"This is an area where our voting system standards are virtually silent," he said. "The voting-system standards only require perfect counting of perfectly marked ballots. They don’t have anything to say about how the machine counts ballots marked by real people in real elections. The standards don’t govern one of the most important things about the machines."
Jones also blamed election officials who fail to properly test machines before elections or who leave pre-election testing and setup of machines for vendors to do, rather than doing it themselves.
"That’s the norm, that the vendor sets up the machines," Jones said. "And my experience is that counties that contract with the vendor to operate the voting system generally don’t do anything to monitor the performance of that contract."
In 2004 in Napa County, California, an optical-scan machine made by Sequoia failed to count more than 6,000 votes, because the Sequoia employee who set up the machine failed to calibrate it to read certain kinds of pens that voters used to mark their ballots.
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