http://www.sptimes.com/2004/09/23/Hillsborough/Elections_site_posts_.shtmlWhile this article does talk about the oddity in the State Attorney's race, it doesn't mention the same problems that occurred with other races.
When Hillsborough's website was reporting a total of 118699 ballots cast, the totals in each of the following races exceeded or equalled that number.
State Attorney Circuit 13 - over by 7192
Property Appraiser - over by 4681
Judge Circuit Court 13 - exactly equal
Judge Group 11 - over by 583
School Board District 7 - over by 671
Now in the above article, the Supervisor of Elections is quick to point out that the website totals were nothing more than human error.
"It's a human error. We input this. We'll fix it today."
Now human error is a plausible explanation for an occasional error (heaven knows, none of us are completely infallible) but the facts of the situation suggest that this was more than just an input error.
First off, the ballots cast total from the Hillsborough website exactly reflected the total of votes cast in the Judge Circuit Court 13 race. While one could accept this as an input error once, could one accept it more than once? Readings taken from the Hillsborough website earlier in the evening show the same pattern - the ballots cast total from the website exactly relected the total of votes cast in the Judge Circuit Court 13 race. If this was human error, its repetitive nature suggests that this was more like a programming error than an input error.
Apparently Hillsborough runs SOEWeb and WinEMS software from a company called SOE Sofware. According to SOE's website (
http://soesoftware.com) these products simplify the gathering and disemination of election data, including results. Without knowing anything about the SOE sofware, I would hazard a guess that something in the setup of the interface between SOE and the Sequoia WinEDS tabulator didn't get tested.
Something that was really odd with the Hillsborough tallies, was the fact that throughout the night, they were reporting totals of individual races to the Secretary of State's office, but were NOT reporting ANY totals of votes cast, not even the incorrect ones that they posted on their own site. So, not only were they reporting erroneous totals on their own site but there appears to have been no attempt to ensure that the numbers sent to the SoS were even remotely close.
Am I suggesting that something nefarious was going on? Of course not, I don't have enough information to do that. I AM suggesting that there was insufficient testing done on the systems to ensure that when garbage goes in, at least processed garbage comes out, instead of different garbage.
Now to the question of undervotes.
After some quick adjustments by Hillsborough staff, they have apparently determined that there were a total of 138389 ballots cast.
Assuming that the top-of-ticket races were the Republican and Democratic Senate seats, there were only 127178 ballots cast in these two races combined. Assuming that people wouldn't be able to vote for a candidate from BOTH parties, it means that there were 11211 people that didn't vote on the top contests. I don't know if that's high or low or normal.
I'll be the first to admit that I know absolutely nothing of the local issues, but from my distance it would seem that the votes cast for State Attorney, Property Appraiser, School Board and Circuit Court Judge should be significantly less than those cast for the top races. It's kinda like rushing to vote for the local dog-catcher, and skipping over the vote for president.
HG