November 17, 2006
A reason for the Williamson weirdness

You may recall the strange discrepancies in the vote totals from Williamson County as reported by the Secretary of State and the Williamson County Clerk. Via Eye on Williamson, we now have an explanation for what happened.


After finalizing all the results from election day, the Williamson County Elections Department found an error in the total votes calculated by computer software.

According to Williamson County Elections Administrator Debra Stacy, the error did not affect the results of the Nov. 7 election.

"Voter sign-in sheets at each voting precinct showed that approximately 84,500 people voted in Williamson County out of 208,521 registered voters for a 40 percent voter turn-out," she said in a written statement. "However, the elections computer software program that tallies all votes, both scanned ballots and electronic votes, recorded more than 91,000 votes."

Stacy said the problem occurred within the Election Systems & Software (ES&S) software program.

"While tallying the final results, the software took the number of electronic votes and multiplied that number by three," she said. "Although there were more votes recorded, it was at the same percentage for both Republican and Democratic candidates. This means that the software problem did not affect the outcome of any election."

Amanda Brown, a spokeswoman for ES&S, said the company is working closely with the county elections division to understand the origin of the problem.

"It hasn't been determined it was a software problem," she said. "It could've been, but it also could've been machine or human error as well. We're working diligently to address what exactly caused the problem."


Dunno how satisfying an explanation that is, but there you have it.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on November 17, 2006 to Election 2006 | TrackBack
Comments

As someone who has been very skeptical of the criticism of e-voting and taken a wait and see attitude toward the whole thing, I think the results are in...there are VERY serious problems here! With paper ballots, you knew that a certain amount would be badly marked by the voter or miscounted by the poll workers, but the margin of error was pretty low - around 1%. The problems with e-voting are producing errors of close to 10% in some cases, and if a county as tech savvy as Williamson (home of Dell Computers!) is having problems with this, it really makes you think. Quality control is a serious problem.

Posted by: el_longhorn on November 17, 2006 10:04 AM