Palm Beach Elections Overturned After Hand-Count Reveals Op-Scans Mistallied Results
Brad Blog | March 30, 2012 | Brad Friedman

The computers got it wrong. The losing candidates were declared and certified as the “winners.” But they didn’t actually receive more votes than their opponents. This time, we happened to find out.
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From the Palm Beach Post:

The supplier of Palm Beach County’s voting and tabulating equipment says a software “shortcoming” led to votes being assigned to the wrong candidates and the elections office declaring the wrong winners in two recent Wellington council races. County Elections Supervisor Susan Bucher, who insisted a computer glitch rather than human error was to blame for the fiasco, claimed vindication after Dominion Voting Systems released its statement.

Wellington and 15 other municipalities held elections on March 13. In Wellington, the ballot was set up with the mayor’s race first, the Seat 1 council race second and the Seat 4 council race third.

Unbeknownst to elections officials, the vote totals for the mayor’s race ended up being reported and later certified as the results of the Seat 1 race. The Seat 1 vote totals were certified as the Seat 4 results and the Seat 4 vote totals were certified as the mayoral results.

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Palm Beach was the home of the Butterfly Ballot in the disastrous 2000 Presidential “Election”; that more than 16,000 votes were unaccounted for in a 2008 primary election recount on their Sequoia Voting Systems optical-scan systems; that the op-scan systems that year failed to count the same ballots the same way twice in those recounts; that Rush Limbaugh’s touch-screen vote froze on him there during the 2008 Presidential election…

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… The systems which will once again be used this November, and which have been used throughout the primary cycle. The systems which failed in Palm Beach were made by Sequoia Voting Systems, which was recently purchased — along with Diebold’s Election Division — by a private Canadian company named Dominion Voting.

With those two acquisitions … Dominion became the second largest e-voting system vendor in the country.

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The Palm Beach Post reports Dominion Voting Systems issued a statement earlier this week from Waldeep Singh, a vice president of customer relations. Prior to that, Singh worked for Sequoia. Prior to that, Singh worked for the California Secretary of State. They all work together. Just not for you.

“The incorrect reporting of vote totals which occurred in the Wellington [Palm Beach County] election was caused by a mismatch between the software which generates the paper ballots and the central tally system,” Singh said in his statement.

“This synchronization difficulty is a shortcoming of the version of software currently being used in Palm Beach County and that shortcoming has been addressed in a subsequent version of the software. These enhancements help to prevent such an anomaly from occurring in the future. Dominion is in the process of providing this newer version to Palm Beach County.”
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The nice thing about hand-counting paper ballots — other than the fact that citizens can actually oversee the results of their own elections and know the results are accurate, is that nobody has to rely on anybody to “certify” secret vote counting software that, years later, will be found to have been certified inaccurately, as is almost always the case.

Of course, the op-scan failure that happened in Palm Springs this year isn’t all that unusual. What’s so unusual is that anybody actually happened to notice it this time, and that election results may actually be changed this long after an election has been certified in which the wrong candidates were announced as the “winners” of their elections.

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