brennan center for justice

November2004ES&SM650FloridaSupervisor of Elections told the paper that themachines likely needed to be recalibrated. 364Broward County, FLAccording to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, aprogramming error in an optical scantabulator would have changed the outcome of aballot measure had it not been caught by alertelection officials. The optical scan tabulator was usedto count absentee ballots. The glitch occurredbecause the machines in use were programmed toaccept only 32,000 votes per discrete ballot item,after which it started counting backward.Once the machines were reprogrammed to allow forcounting of all of the votes, the measure receivedmore than 64,000 “yes” votes and it passed. 365November2004DieboldAccuVote OSFloridaFor more on this incident, see case study 6 on page 15 ofthis report.Volusia County, FLAccording to local media, seven Diebold optical scanmemory cards failed, causing votes to disappear. 366One card’s tally was missing 13,244 votes.June 2004 ES&S iVotronic Florida Eleven Florida CountiesFive months before the 2004 general election, MiamiHerald reported that state election officials hadlearned of a flaw in the touchscreen voting machinesin use in eleven of the state’s counties that wouldprevent the conduct of a manual recount in the eventof a close race. 367It later came to light that Miami-Dade countydiscovered the problem more than a year earlier,when the director of the county’s technologydepartment found during an audit that the electroniclog of voting activity produced by the systemscrambled the machines’ serial numbers. 368November2002ES&SiVotronicFloridaFor more on this incident, see case study 7 on page 16 ofthis report.Broward County, FLCNN reported that a software error caused 103,222votes, cast with ES&S iVotronic paperless machines,to be left uncounted in the original tally. The errorBrennan Center for Justice | 63