IN - Machine's firm takes blame for vote mixupgreenspun.com : LUSENET : Y2K discussion group : One Thread |
Close to 400 Monroe County voters whose ballots weren't tallied by a computer on election night 2000 finally have a plausible culprit to blame.At the fourth county election board meeting on the topic in a month, penitent officials of the county's voting machine and computer supplier, MicroVote, admitted they'd goofed.
A company representative who was demonstrating a new software package to chief election clerk Tara Stogsdill before the election forgot to remove the experimental program from the county election computer.
On election night, static electricity triggered the correction logic in the cartridges storing the votes from two county voting machines from Perry Township precinct 9 and one in Bloomington Township 21, when they were inserted into the reader in the vote-tallying computer.
But the cartridges' correction logic was designed to work with what MicroVote calls its Version 7.3, not the experimental Version 7.4 still in the computer after the demonstration. Without the 7.3 version, the computer read zeroes for votes from the two machines.
And because the computer provides a precinct-by-precinct vote tally instead of a machine-by-machine vote tally, it was months before election numbers- crunchers noticed there was a big "undervote" in the two precincts.
The MicroVote representative, Steve Shamo, plus company software maintenance man Steve Wyatt and system developer Bill Carson all said MicroVote was to blame for the problem.
They said they didn't finally pin it down until after a recent election board meeting, when they called up Stogsdill and asked her to check her computer sign-on sequence for the software package. When she said "7.4," they knew what the problem was.
They assured the election board and other concerned people at the meeting that the problem had been corrected and the right software package had been reinstated.
They also said they have provided the county a program for a computerized machine-by-machine spreadsheet for primary night on May 7 so they can double-check immediately for any obvious incongruities.
There are no problems at all with the county's touchpad electronic voting machines or the cartridges in them, they said.
One local official, City Clerk Regina Moore, asked whether this was a final explanation.
She said "a ripple of laughter went through the community" when "static electricity" was offered two weeks ago by MicroVote as the explanation for the vote count glitch. She said it has "undermined the credibility of the election process" in the county. The MicroVote trio didn't dispute her.
But the three election board members — county Clerk Pat Haley, Democrat Jack Davis and Republican Steve Hogan — all said they were satisfied with Tuesday's explanation.
Hogan thanked the three MicroVote officials "for being so open and taking the blame when it's due."
"I appreciate the candor," said county Democratic chairman Frank McCloskey. "It is a bizarre mistake."
Hoosier Times
-- Anonymous, April 17, 2002