FACT: ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES HAVE MISCOUNTED VOTES
There are well-documented cases when anomalies have happened with DREs and ballot processing machines. Votes have been changed right in front of the voter’s eyes. Votes have been changed, by the machines, out of the sight of the voters. Voting machine vendors do not dispute these happenings; instead, they shrug their shoulders and claim that the problems have been fixed or that the problem was just a computer glitch.
Listed below, we provide some of the instances where problems have been noted with electronic voting machines. How many others have gone undetected? We have no way of knowing.
Missing Votes Break Florida Law!
(Follow this entire story here)
Broward County, Florida - January 6, 2004
In a Special Election for a vacated state House Seat, 134 voters’ votes were not counted. They went to the polls, they signed in, and they went to the DREs; but their votes were never counted.
''It's incomprehensible that 134 people went to the polls and didn't cast votes,'' said Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman, who served on the canvassing board that oversaw Tuesday night's count.
(Source: The Miami Herald, 7 Jan. 2004; link)
A later article points out the problem election officials face: “The remaining 134 invalid ballots cannot be manually recounted because they were cast electronically on computerized voting machines and there is no written record of those votes.” The former mayor remarked, "That tells me they picked a voting machine that doesn't follow the [law]." Florida law requires a manual recount if the winning margin accounts for less the one-fourth of one percent of the votes, as it does in this case with a margin was 12 votes. But without paper records a recount is impossible.
And this wasn't the only electronic counting problem that day: "Julie Morrall, who finished fifth, lost a vote when officials discovered one ballot was actually an overvote, in which the voter selected more than one candidate, and a tabulation machine misread it."
(Source: The Sun Sentinel, 9 Jan. 2004; link)
Mississippi Meltdown Results In Election Rerun...
Hinds County, Mississippi - November 2003
Hinds County Tax Payers had spent $1.6 Million for new AVS WINvote touch screen voting systems. The county trained their poll workers, deployed the new machines, and opened the polls at 7AM on November 4 for an important
election. On the ballot was a full slate of candidates and issues, including a State Senate race and a County Tax Assessor race.
Almost immediately, the machines began to fail. Overheated systems, and the absence of a backup solution led to a long and frustrating day for poll workers and voters alike. This was followed by a 2-month debate that eventually resulted in exasperated candidates, and a new election being demanded by the Mississippi State Legislature.
Here is the story of the first election that has to be rerun in its entirety, because faulty touch screen election systems prevented the "will of the voters" from being accurately determined.
The case of the "Jumping X"
Maryland - November 5, 2002
Voters watched as they voted for the Republican candidate for governor and the ‘X’ appeared beside the name of the Democratic candidate. The machines used were Diebold DREs with no paper ballot so the machines could not be audited. “I pushed a Republican ticket for governor and his name disappeared,” said Kevin West of Upper Marlboro. “Then the Democrat’s name got an ‘X’ put in it.”
(Source: The Washington Times, 6 November 2002; “Glitches cited at some polls….”)
Fairfax County, Virginia - November 4, 2003
Some voters watched as the ‘X’ they put beside the name of Republican School Board Member, Rita Thompson, dimmed out and moved to her Democratic opponent. Ms. Thompson complained and one machine was tested. Surprised officials watched as the machine subtracted approximately 1 out of 100 votes for Ms. Thompson.
The machines used were Advanced Voting Solutions WINvote DREs that had just been purchased by the county as part of their move to become compliant with the new HAVA requirements.
(Source: The Washington Post, Nov. 6, 2003; link)
Notice the similarities in these two incidents. The machines were from different vendors, but in both cases the problems were of the same type; the vote would mysteriously change right in front of the voters eyes. Of course there were no paper ballots, so correct audits of the ballots could NOT be accomplished.
Result: Fairfax County Republican Committee refers to the experience with the new election equipment as "a bitter disappointment - at best," calls for Voter-Verified Paper Ballot!
A Strong Case for a Paper Trail
Are DREs the only machines to blame for problems? No! As evidenced by the following:
In Snyder, Scurry County, Texas, in November 2002, an electronic glitch turned the election of two Scurry County Commissioners upside down. Tuesday night, it was thought that Republicans Robbie Floyd and Keith Hackfeld had won their races. However, Scurry County Clerk Joan Bunch said it was discovered that a defective computer chip in the county's optical scanner had misread the ballots and incorrectly given the two a landslide victory. After a hand count of the ballots and also a re-scan with a repaired scanner, it turned out that the two supposed winners had actually lost. The final numbers looked like this: Jerry House (D) 678 - Robbie Floyd (R) 436. Chloanne Lindsey (D) 512 - Keith Hackfeld (R) 336. The candidates were notified of the correction Wednesday morning.
(Source: KTXS TV Nov. 2002; link)
This was a problem with optical-scan machines, so there was a paper ballot that could be recounted. In this case, the county election officials didn’t wait for the new chip to be flown in; they did a hand count to back up anything that they did. | 
