E-Voting System Adds 100,000+ Votes in One Texas County During Tuesday's Primary...

E-Voting System Adds 100,000+ Votes in One Texas County During Tuesday's Primary Election!

Bradblog | March 10, 2006
Hart InterCivic Paperless Touch-Screen Systems Flat-Out Fails in Tarrant County, TX Officials Ignored Prob on Election Night, Blame 'Program Snafu' the Next DayWe hope to have much more on this tomorrow...but for now, this from the Star-Telegram today : An undetected computer glitch in Tarrant County led to inflated election returns in...

We hope to have much more on this tomorrow...but for now, this from the Star-Telegram today:

An undetected computer glitch in Tarrant County led to inflated election returns in Tuesday's primaries but did not alter the outcome of any local race, elections and county officials said Wednesday.

The error caused Tarrant County to report as many as 100,000 votes in both primaries that never were cast, dropping the local turnout from a possible record high of about 158,103 voters to about 58,000.
...
Questions about possible problems were raised by election staff late Tuesday night, as it became apparent to some that the county would far exceed the 76,000 votes cast in the 2002 primary elections.

But elections officials did not look into the discrepancies that night because they were dealing with a new system, new procedures and some new equipment, said Gayle Hamilton, Tarrant County's interim elections administrator.

"We didn't think there was a problem," Hamilton said. "We should have stopped right then.

"But we didn't question it at that time."

The problem stemmed from a programming error by Hart InterCivic, which manufactured the equipment and wrote the software for the local voting system.
...
"The system did what we told it to do," said John Covell, a vice president with Hart. "We told it incorrectly."

See this previous report for scores of additional e-voting problems reported yesterday, just after Texas' first Primary Election since adding loads of new electronic voting machines this year. (Keep an out for today's 'Daily Voting News' to be posted here shortly...where we expect there will be many more such reports.)