Ballot-Scanner Voting System Failures in the News — A Partial List

[Wilms]

Ballot-Scanner Voting System Failures in the News — A Partial List

Ellen Theisen Director, www.VotersUnite.Org
May 22, 2009

Executive Summary

Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines have been widely discredited throughout the United States and abroad. As a result, many U.S. jurisdictions are turning to ballot scanners (often called “optical scanners”) to tabulate votes marked on paper ballots. Florida and New Mexico have passed laws that ban the use of DREs, and other states are moving away from using DREs as well.

Data collected from over 1,000 news stories and voter hot line reports justifies this trend. The reports revealed over three times as many problems with DREs as with ballot scanners during the 2006 general election.

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While the trend toward ballot scanners has been motivated in large part by the unreliability of DREs and the inability to conduct meaningful audits of DRE results, there are risks associated with the use of ballot scanners also. It is not uncommon for scanner systems to malfunction during elections, causing confusion, counting delays, and even inaccurate results.

Despite historical evidence of scanner miscounts, results generated by ballot-scanner systems are rarely verified by a hand count unless the results appear implausible. Virtually all the miscounts described in this document (over 100) were detected by hand counting ballots when scanners produced implausible results. In some cases, erroneous results were certified because they appeared plausible and the error was discovered only after certification. Laws in some jurisdictions do not allow a timely and meaningful verification of the results. This means that inaccurate tallies may remain undetected, and outcomes that a hand count would have reversed may be certified.

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http://www.votersunite.org/info/OpScansInTheNews.pdf