The 197 uncounted ballots would not have changed the outcome of any of the election's races, according to Humboldt County Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich.
Crnich said the company that provides the county's election software, Premier Elections Solutions (formerly known as Diebold Election Systems, Inc.), seems to have known about the glitch at least since 2004.
Crnich said a discrepancy in vote counts came to her attention after the election was officially certified by the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors, while she and volunteers were preparing ballot images for the transparency project.
The basic idea behind the first-of-its-kind transparency project is fairly simple: every ballot cast in an election is passed through an optical scanner after being officially counted and the images are then placed online and available for download.
Software, created by volunteer Mitch Trachtenberg, then allows viewers to sort the ballots by precinct or race to conduct recounts at their pleasure.
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After double checking all of the precinct's logs and ballots, Crnich said she discovered a deck of 197 vote-by-mail ballots for the precinct that had been run through the ballot counting optical scanner, but did not seem to appear in the final vote tallies.
After exchanging several calls with Premier Elections Solutions, Crnich said she was told that the software begins counting decks of ballots at zero, and that sometimes when a deck is deleted from the machine due to normal complications, the software also deletes the Deck Zero, which in this case was the vote-by-mail ballots from Precinct 1E-45.
Crnich said she then called the Secretary of State's Office.
"They were very interested and actually offered great congratulations on this project," Crnich said.
Crnich said she later learned from the Secretary of State's Office that two other California counties, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo, use the same version of GEMS elections software (version 1.18.19), as well as several entire states, including Maryland.
The Secretary of State's Office was not immediately available for comment by deadline and a late call to Premier Elections Solutions was not answered.
Crnich said it appears that Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties had been informed of the software glitch, and were told how to work around it to avoid having any effect on the election counts.
The Secretary of State's Office, however, had not been notified of the problem despite having conducted a top-to-bottom review of the state's elections systems in 2006, according to Crnich.
The scariest part of all this, said Trachtenberg, is that the issue would have never been uncovered without the transparency project.
"Has this happened in other counties or other states?" he asked. "How can we know?"
