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That's exactly what happened in Cleveland on May 7, 2003. Election officials said they ran into problems with the electronic voting machines when they tried to merge the numbers from their Lorain and Elyria offices.
The elections board used two different kinds of ''touch-screen'' voting machines in two Cleveland counties and the results couldn't be merged with totals from another county, which came from more familiar punch cards.
''I don't know exactly what happened ... we're having software people look into that now,'' said Marilyn Jacobcik, the board of elections executive director. ''But we are assured that all the numbers are accurate.''
One of the biggest problems, according to one election worker, was that the office wasn't prepared to compile data from three different computer systems.
John Blevins, a member of the board of elections, attributed the breakdown to ''growing pains.''
Because of the Help America Vote Act passed last year, he said, elections boards are required to install electronic voting machines by the 2004 election.
''We were basically trying two different computer systems,'' Blevins said, noting the county used machines provided by Diebold in North Ridgeville and MicroVote in the Amherst race. ''I realize maybe things move a little slower but in the end it will be a much smoother operation. We have to do this by November 2004.''
Computerized voting and the technological problems related to the system had already been realized before hanging chads became a household phrase. In November 1998, an election in Hawaii was held using state-of-the-art computers designed by Electronic Systems & Software, a company with close ties to Republican lawmakers in Washington, D.C.
One such lawmaker, Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb, was part owner and former chairman and chief executive of ES&S, a company that made all the equipment that counted the votes during his last two runs for office, yet he failed to list his ties to the company on federal disclosure forms.
Seven of ES&S' 361 voting machines used in Hawaii on Election Day in November 1998 malfunctioned (five units had lens occlusion, one unit had a defective cable and one unit had a defective "read head"), which led to Hawaii's first ever statewide election review and a first in the history of the United States. Hundreds of people who used the machines complained mightily to local election officials that the candidates they picked did not register in the computerized system.
Mercuri said in an interview with Common Dreams last year that in order for an electronic voting system to be foolproof, five components must be present - a voter, a ballot, a computerized voting machine, a printer, and an optical scanner - and three basic steps must be taken.
"First, the voting machine registers a voter's selection both electronically and on a paper ballot. Second, the machine then displays the paper ballot behind clear glass or plastic so that the voter can review their selection, but not take the ballot home by mistake. If the voter's selection doesn't agree with the ballot or the voter makes a mistake, the voter can call a poll worker to void the ballot, and then re-vote. And third, the paper ballot is optically scanned (most likely at the county administration building), providing a second electronic tally. If anything goes wrong with either the voting machines or the optical scanner, the paper ballots can be hand-counted as a last resort or as part of an audit. And voila! We have a fully auditable voting system with checks and balances, review and redundancy."
There are dozens of other horror stories that spawned from the signing of the Omnibus bill by President Bush and these too involve Florida and a Bush.
The new touch-screen equipment used during the September 2002 Florida elections wrongfully credited GOP gubernatorial candidate Jeb Bush in one precinct when votes were cast for the Democratic candidate for governor because of a "misaligned" touch screen. No one knows how many votes were misrecorded. Miami-Dade was still licking its wounds over the 2000 presidential election that helped put George Bush in office. For the primary election, the county spent $24.5 million for 7,200 voting machines, but many polling places opened late or did not have enough machines up and running. Many poll workers had problems collecting votes from the machines, delaying the final results of the election for a week.
The November general election was relatively glitch-free, but the county had to turn the logistics of the election over to the Miami-Dade police department and dedicate at least three county employees to each polling place.
In May, a Miami-Dade Inspector General released the results of a seven-month investigation into the use of the
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