Iowa - Machine Subtracts Votes From Candidate

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Thursday, June 8. 2006

Iowa - Machine Subtracts Votes From Candidate

Faulty voting machines delay results; counting under way
The Daily Nonpareil (IA)

The counting in Tuesday's Pottawattamie County primary election came to a sudden halt shortly after midnight today when Pottawattamie County Auditor Marilyn Jo Drake announced to the waiting courthouse crowd that something wasn't right with the new computers purchased to count the ballots.

As a result, all of Tuesday's ballots were in the process of being counted by hand today. Drake said the winners in Tuesday's election might not be known until around midnight this evening.

"We have no clue," she said of the cause of the problem.

But, something wasn't just right from the very beginning, she added.

Things began to look fishy, Drake said, when the county's new computers counted the absentee ballots in the Republican Party's county race between longtime Recorder John Sciortino and newcomer Oscar Duran.

Absentee ballots are the ones counted first. When all of those were counted, Duran, a University of Nebraska at Omaha student, had 99 votes, while Sciortino, the county recorder since 1983, had just 79.

As Tuesday's votes kept coming in, she kept a close eye on that race.

"His (Sciortino's) totals kept going down," Drake said.

Indeed, Duran held a 877- to 793-vote lead after 28 of the county's 41 precincts were counted.

Eventually, Sciortino took the lead after 37 precincts were counted, but by only two votes, 1,112 to 1,110.

Sciortino was surprised at the tight race when he saw those numbers.

"It's closer than I thought it would be," he said. "He did better than I thought he would."

Drake said she decided to count the absentee ballots by hand to determine if the computers were counting correctly.

They weren't - not by a long shot.

The actual absentee ballot count in the recorder's race when done by hand found Sciortino had 153 votes and Duran just 25.

It was then that she decided to stop the computer counting in all the races.

The problems were noticed when they started counting the absentee votes. As absentee
ballots were being counted (by machine), it was noticed that the machine was subtracting votes from the county recorder of 23 years

Now this is really interesting, look at the computer count:

Duran 99 + Sciortino 79 = total 178

When all of those were counted, Duran, a University of Nebraska at Omaha student, had 99 votes, while Sciortino, the county recorder since 1983, had just 79.

Votes for County recorder of 23 years get "un-recorded"

"His (Sciortino's) totals kept going down," Drake said.

Now look at the hand to eye count -

Duran 25 + Sciortino 153 = total 178

The actual absentee ballot count in the recorder's race when done by hand found Sciortino had 153 votes and Duran just 25.

So, the total, (178) stayed the same, only the name of the winner changed.

What is not clear to me is which part of the counting was involved - when the ballots were scanned or when the vote totals were uploaded into the central tabulator? If during uploading, how were the votes uploaded?

Has anyone heard about this exact same vote total and same problem elsewhere in the country with ES&S?

Posted by Joyce McCloy at 08:35 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

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Someone should go to the State prosecutor and report the discrepency as a crime and ask that the voting machines be sequestered as evidence in a criminal probe.

Also, make a publicity call for whisteleblowers.

Looks like someone tried to buy an election.

#1 Anonymous on 2006-06-08 09:20 (Reply)

It's as if there is computer code in the machine to actual do this type of vote switching. Normally, it's only triggered when the corrupt ES&S employee turns on that 'feature'... to fix an election. The fact that this 'feature' may have come on at a bad time may expose the corruption in the company.

If what I describe is not true, at least the ES&S programmers should start to realize they are as suspect as the Diebold programmers, whether it's due to negligence in coding or deliberate fraud.

Len Rideout
Software Engineer
Boston, MA

#2 Len Rideout on 2006-06-08 13:54 (Reply)

Sounds a lot like "preloading". The digital recording device is preloaded with a number of votes for the candidate the tamperer wishes to favor, and an equal number of negative votes for the unfavored candidate. The counting machine doesn't recognize the negative vote as being illegal and adds it to the total, thus effectively shifting the the votes to the other candidate.
The voting machines are presumably cleared before the election. A simple test would be to run a count before the polls open.
The fact that the machines can have a negative count may be negligence or fraud. Intentionally preloading the count is undoubtedly fraud.
A procedure should be in place to verify a zero count on all vote recording devices before the election and steps should be taken to insure the recording devices are not tampered with after the verification and before the voting.

#3 Anonymous on 2006-07-11 13:42 (Reply)

I worked with optical readers including bar code, optical handwriting recognition and mark sense readers for several years. It is possible that a poorly designed ballot form could cause the ocr application to misinterpret the form.

General form design rules:
1) use target marks to insure proper recognition of the form alignment with the field definitions. Target marks are black dots near the upper left and lower right corners. Target marks are used by the reader application to align the scanned image and to determine if the image is inverted (upside down). If the target marks are absent or improperly located, the application may errantly flip the image.

2) Do NOT place mark-sense fields, checkboxes or target marks in a symetrical fashion. In other words, don't center anything that is read by the reader. Asymetric positioning of target marks allows the application to detect and correct for a form being scanned upside down. Asymetric placement of fields and check boxes prevents them from being registered if the scanned image is errantly inverted.
I am guessing that the ballot in question had 2 checkboxes center on the paper and that there were either no target marks or that target marks were used but they were placed equal distances from opposite corners. If some of the ballots were scanned upside down or if the auto alignment function inverted the scanned image, with the check boxes centered, the votes would hae been counted backward from what was actually cast.
Also, someone familiar with the technology, could presumably create a counterfit ballot with target marks positions in such a way to cause the reader to invert the image. The changes would not be obvious to a casual observer. This could be easiliy managed with a visit to the local Kinko's.

#4 Niklaus Pfirsig on 2006-07-14 10:48 (Reply)

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