Report: E-voting problems cause loss of votes

More than 4,500 votes were lost in one N.C. county

By Grant Gross

November 5, 2004 12:00 PM ET

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IDG News Service - Electronic voting machine problems caused more than 4,500 votes to be lost in one North Carolina county during Tuesday's general election, and gave U.S. President George Bush more than 3,800 extra votes in an Ohio county, according to reports by The Associated Press.
In North Carolina's Carteret County, apparent confusion over the storage capacity of UniLect Corp. e-voting machines caused the county to lose 4,530 votes, according to AP. County officials apparently believed the model of e-voting machine they were using held 10,500 votes, but that model held only 3,005 votes.
The 4,530 votes lost cannot be recovered, according to AP. UniLect owner and President Jack Gerbel was not immediately available for comment today. The county Board of Elections issued a short statement saying an investigation by the North Carolina State Board of Elections is continuing.
In the Ohio incident, a glitch in e-voting machines made by Election Systems & Software Inc. caused Bush to receive an extra 3,893 votes, more than five times the votes actually cast in the precinct in question.
Unofficial results in Franklin County had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes. Election records showed that only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct, according to AP. Bush beat Kerry by about 136,000 votes in Ohio, according to unofficial results.
Neither a county elections official nor an ES&S spokesman were immediately available to comment.
Tuesday's close presidential race was decided when enough votes in Ohio had been tallied for Bush to be declared the winner there, giving him that state's 20 electoral votes.

Reprinted with permission from

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