Major ES&S EVoting Problems in Montana

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By Steve Corrick (about the author) Page 1 of 3 page(s)

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For OpEdNews: Steve Corrick - Writer

The nation held its breath as the counting in the highly contested Senate race in Montana extended on into midmorning the Wednesday after election Tuesday, with national control of the US Senate hanging in the balance. When it was finally resolved, Democrat Jon Tester beat sitting Senator Conrad Burns by 2,735 votes in the final unofficial count.

What went wrong? In the news story that follows this introduction, you'll learn that, in spite of his repeated warnings that election day registrations could be a problem, many were quick to criticize Montana Secretary of State Brad Johnson for failing to prepare the county election officials for the onslaught of election day registrants who wanted to vote. However, Johnson did far better than the election officials in many other states, and even, on October 15, had issued a great ruling which may have prevented even more election day software problems by requiring a 5% random testing of the voting machines after the election had started on November 7.

So the real story of why the vote took so long is that, once again, the electronic voting machines proved far less reliable than simple human counting: Yellowstone County (Billings, MT) had to start their count over because ES&S software installed only a month!!! before the election required the County Clerk to reset the machines after the absentee ballots were counted and he forgot to do so on two out of the three machines. Silver Bow County (Butte, MT) had serious software problems that delayed their count until the next morning--and had them reporting "final" results when there were still 4,500 uncounted votes. In Flathead County (Kalispell, MT), the machines failed so badly that county officials were forced to conduct their entire count by hand.

The result? As usual, in spite of great elections officials and a lot of preelection preparation, another American election was left hanging by poorly programmed and unstable computerized electronic vote counting machinery.

When are we going to learn that humans may fail or manipulate vote totals, but they almost never are 900 or 18,000 or 13,000,000 votes off, as the election machines frequently have been?

See the summary story that follows:

Let all our votes be counted--by hand on hand-marked paper ballots,

Best,

Steve Corrick
EnduringVoteMontana.org

What went wrong?
Posted: Friday, Nov 10, 2006 - 12:23:45 am MST
By LYNNETTE HINTZE

http://www.dailyinterlake.com/articles/2006/11/10/news/news02.txt

Computer glitch, Election Day registration slowed Flathead vote The Daily Inter Lake

During an election night filled with voting snafus statewide, Flathead County once again struggled with glitches in the computer software designed to tabulate vote totals.

It was deja vu for election officials who had vowed to have final results tallied by 10 p.m. on Tuesday. By 10 a.m. on Wednesday, the county still had about 200 provisional ballots to process.

Officials made the same promise of early results for the June primary election, only to face computer software problems that delayed vote counting by several hours.

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