brennan center for justice

7. Florida, June 2004According to the Miami Herald, only five months before the 2004 general election, some state officialslearned that touch-screen voting machines used in 11 of the state’s counties contained a software flaw thatwould make it impossible to conduct a manual recount of ballot images in close races. 96 Election officialsin at least one Florida county knew about the problem as early as 2002, but for whatever reason, theexistence of the flaw was not understood by the relevant State election officials for nearly a full year. 97Miami-Dade County learned of the problem after an election in May 2003. The division director ofthe County’s technology department found that the electronic event log of voting activity scrambledthe serial numbers of voting machines. 98 He wrote a letter to the County elections supervisor on June 6,2003 stating that “I believe there is a serious ‘bug’ in the program(s) that generate these reports, makingthe reports unusable for the purpose that we were considering (audit an election, recount an electionand, if necessary, use these reports to certify an election).” 99The vendor of the machine assured all parties that the software flaw would not affect the counting ofvotes. Nevertheless, there was concern that if counties were ordered to produce a record of the votes ina close race for the purpose of conducting a recount, some of the relevant data could be lost. 100Press reports indicate that, at least initially, the media attention to the flaw in June 2004 led to around of finger-pointing among Florida election officials, with the Florida Secretary of State “blasting”Miami-Dade officials for failing to notify her office when they learned of the problem a year earlier,and Miami-Dade officials, arguing that other counties that discovered the same problem should havenotified the state, to put more pressure on the vendor to “come up with a so-called work-around to theproblem before the mistake was repeated.” 101Again, a centralized database that listed reports of problems from vendors and election officials wouldprobably have provided election officials in Florida with much earlier notice of the problem.• • •8. Alameda and San Diego Counties, California, March 2004According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, on the morning of the March 2 primary election, more than700 Diebold precinct control modules that activate the cards used to call up ballots on touch screenmachines displayed the wrong start-up screen. 102 With no way to load ballots onto the voting machines,hundreds of polling sites had to delay opening their doors, some by as much as three hours. 103 Somevoters told the Union Tribune that they had to leave before getting the opportunity to cast a ballot. 104Shortly after the primary, a Diebold spokesman acknowledged that the start up screen on precinctcontrol modules could fail in the event of a problem with the unit’s power supply, calling the glitch “apossibility […] but it was an improbability.” 105 A report released by the company six weeks later revealedthat the problem was caused by faulty power switches that failed to fully turn off the units when placedin the ‘off’ position, causing power to drain from the machines before election day. 106The Secretary of State’s Voting Systems and Procedures Panel called a hearing in late April to examinethe problems experienced during the primary. At the hearing, former Diebold technician James Dunntestified that the problems with batteries losing power were evident before the machines were shippedto San Diego and Alameda counties. 10716 | Brennan Center for Justice