brennan center for justice

incident. 140 Because the manufacturer of the system was no longer in business, the county had to trackdown a programmer familiar with the system to corroborate its theory. 141 County Election ManagerJudy Flaig acknowledges that conducting the type of investigation necessary to determine the causeof the problem to even this limited extent would not have been possible for every county, and that asmuch as jurisdictions try to communicate with manufacturers and one another, some information fallsthrough the cracks.“Most jurisdictions don’t have the resources to do this kind of work,” Flaig said,“something like [a database of voting machine problems] would really be helpful.” 142Rokey Suleman, Fairfax County Registrar at the time of the incident, says he still does not knowwhat caused the problem. Although he no longer works in Fairfax County, he believes other officialsusing these machines “should certainly want to know what happened, so that they can put the properprocedures in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again.” 143Hinds County, Mississippi also uses the AVS WinVotes. Suleman noted that “unless they read a tinyVienna, Virginia newspaper where this story was reported, there’s no way they would know about thisproblem.” 144 Indeed, the Brennan Center contacted Hinds County Supervisor Robert Graham, and hehad never heard of the problems in Fairfax County.Suleman, who is now the Executive Director of the District of Columbia’s Board of Elections and Ethics,noted that in addition to providing election officials with notice of potential problems with the machinesthey are using, a central database would have other benefits for election officials. Mr. Suleman stated thatWashington, D.C. “just went through a procurement process for new voting machines,” and that hewould have been greatly helped by a central database that could “serve as a repository to let me know whatissues exist with the machines, rather than having to rely on what the vendors spoon-feed me.”12. District of Columbia, September 2008• • •A District of Columbia Council investigation after the District’s 2008 primary found that vote totalsoriginally produced by a Sequoia tally server on election night were “obviously inaccurate.” 145 TheBoard of Elections traced the problem to a cartridge for a Sequoia precinct-count optical scanner in oneprecinct, which reported voter turnout nearly twice that of the registered population of the precinct andshowed 1,554 write-in votes in a race without a write-in campaign. 146 In two reports in the WashingtonPost, election officials indicated that the malfunctioning cartridge caused other problems with thepreliminary vote totals. 147 According to acting Executive Director of the D.C. Board of Elections SylviaGoldsberry-Adams, “one defective cartridge caused vote totals to be duplicated into multiple races onthe summary report issued by our office;” on this summary report, 1,542 appeared as the number ofovervotes in five contests. 148The District Board of Elections asked Sequoia to explain the problems. In an initial response, Sequoiastated that it found “no anomalies or irregularities in either the data or the internal event logs that canbe identified as having caused or contributed to the issue experienced on election night.” 149 In responseto the Board’s request for a more detailed explanation, Sequoia issued a report that attributed theproblem to human error and ruled out “[e]ndemic hardware and software failures […] as the cause.” 150As for the Board’s request for information about past occurrences of this error, Sequoia responded,“[s]ince our customers conduct the actual elections – not Sequoia – we do not have any way of keepingtrack of such incidents, nor is it our responsibility to do so.” 151Brennan Center for Justice | 21