brennan center for justice

Humboldt County Election Director Crnich has stated that if there were an EAC database withinformation detailing problems that other counties had experienced using the same voting system usedin Humboldt County that she could have accessed before the November 2008 election, she almostcertainly would have used it. Such a database would have alerted her to the programming issue with hercounty’s tally server, as well as the workaround. Crnich stated that she believed it was well within theEAC’s mandate to provide this kind of information to local election officials and that new officials, whomight have little experience with the systems they are charged with using, would particularly benefitfrom this kind of database. 573. Orange County, Florida, November 2006In 2007, the Florida Division of Elections listed Orange County as experiencing the highest undervoterates in the state on absentee ballots cast in the 2006 general election for both the U.S. Senate race and thestate Governor’s race. 58 Alarmed by the exceptionally high rate of undervoted ballots in a major election– nearly 5 percent – the Florida Fair Elections Center’s Associate Director contacted the Orange CountyElections Administrator, who promised to investigate the issue. 59 According to the Center, Orange Countyofficials responded to the inquiry by stating that their manual inspection of the ballots confirmed thatsome legitimately cast ballots had not been counted. The Center adds that when they questioned thevendor of the county’s OpTech optical scan machines about the problem, the vendor’s representativeidentified the problem as the scanners’ failure to read certain types of gel ink used by voters to completetheir ballots. 60On further investigation, the Center discovered that the same problem seemed to have occurred onsimilar scanning equipment in March of 2004 in Napa County, California. In that election, opticalscanners manufactured by Sequoia failed to count some ballots voted with gel ink. 61 This problem wasonly discovered during the state’s legally-mandated hand count of 1 percent of the ballots cast in theelection. 62 Sequoia told Wired magazine that the problem was not with the machines themselves, butrather with the county’s calibration procedures – the machines were calibrated to read only carbon ink,not dye-based ink found in many gel pens. 63 According to Sequoia, the issue could have been avoidedthrough more thorough pre-election testing. 64When the Florida Fair Elections Center delved more deeply into the history of this type of problem,they learned that in the 2000 election, Orange County’s optical scan machines failed to count morethan 400 votes in the presidential race for no apparent reason. 65 At the time, it was postulated that onepossible explanation for the machines’ failure to count these ballots was “low carbon content in theink pens used to mark them.” 66 Kitty Garber, Associate Director of the Center, believes that both thevendor and the state were well aware of this before the time she discovered the issue in 2007 – in partbecause the vendor so quickly identified the source of the problem. For some reason, she states, thiswas not adequately “communicated to the people actually running the elections” in Orange County in2004 or 2006. 67Bill Cowles, Supervisor of Elections for Orange County noted in an interview with us that the countyswitched to a different model of ES&S scanner after the 2006 general election. 68 Florida has alsoimplemented a post-election audit law in the intervening years, though a 2008 study by the BrennanCenter and others has been critical of that audit as being insufficiently robust to catch many problems. 69Brennan Center for Justice | 13