Voting machine glitch shows thousands of extra votes

The clerk of Boone County, Indiana, knew something wasn't right when electronic vote-counting equipment showed more than 140,000 votes had been cast in the Nov. 4 municipal elections there. The county has only 50,000 residents and less than half of them were eligible to vote in this election.

A piece of equipment used to project the vote tally onto a wall, part of an electronic voting package from MicroVote General Corp., was apparently not functioning correctly, but county officials were able to fix the problem and start the vote count over again, said Lisa Garoffolo, county clerk. Early vote totals were delayed about 90 minutes because of the mix-up, she said.

"We knew something was off. We just had a lot of people standing outside wanting to know what their numbers were, and they had to wait. They're not used to doing that," she said, describing the moments after the first vote tally came in, with candidates waiting to see how they had done.

In the election, for positions such as mayor and city council member in cities across Boone County, fewer than 19,000 voters were eligible to vote, and 5,352 people voted. Boone County is in central Indiana, about 25 miles northwest of Indianapolis.

The problem had nothing to do with the vote-tallying equipment itself, said Steve Shamo, a sales representative for MicroVote General. It appears that county officials forgot to reset an add-on piece of equipment that projects the vote numbers onto a wall or screen so that onlookers can see the running vote total, he said.

The machine counting the real vote numbers was never compromised, Shamo said, and the projector is set to spit out unrealistic numbers when it hasn't been reset as a way to warn voting officials that it needs attention. "If you don't re-initialize the computer on election day, it just throws up ridiculously huge numbers," Shamo said.

The county has scheduled a meeting with MicroVote General, which is based in Indianapolis, to go over the problem, Garoffolo said. "They're supposed to meet with us in a couple of weeks to make sure whatever happened doesn't happen again," she said. "I hope we'll get more definitive answers in our meeting. I don't want it to happen next spring."

Even if the projection machine hadn't spit out unrealistic numbers, Garoffolo said she would have known if votes were being counted incorrectly. "I know how many registered voters are in each precinct," she said. "I would have known right away, even if it wasn't as glaring as it was." There's little likelihood that wrong numbers would have gone unnoticed in Boone County, although "I can't say in a big county" whether that would happen, she added.

Boone County has used MicroVote General's electronic voting equipment since the spring of 1998 and not had any other problems, Garoffolo said. MicroVote General's electronic voting products, which allow voters to input their votes into an electronic voting machine instead of using a paper ballot, are used in about 200 jurisdictions in 10 states, Shamo said.