City Election Goes to Paper Ballots After Votes Disappeared on Malfunctioning Touch-Screen System, Memory Card
Aurora City Election May Have to Be Run Again...
By Brad Friedman on 5/17/2007, 7:30pm PT  

From the Wise County Messenger in Texas...

Thirty-eight votes in the Aurora city election are missing and the problem is being turned over to the office of the secretary of state, City Administrator Toni Kelly-Richardson said Tuesday.

The city may have to have another election, officials said.

The city used three Diebold Election Systems voting machines in its election – two were designated for early voting and the other for election day.

When one of the early voting machines stopped allowing people to cast ballots, Kelly-Richardson said the city switched to paper ballots.
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The memory card, which stores the votes from the machine, was “pulled out and sealed up” until the results should be counted, she said.
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When the memory card was opened from storage and placed in a machine for reading, it showed to have no votes on it.

“We knew that the card had 38 ballots on it,” she said.

The story gets even more amazing as a fire breaks out in city hall, where the machines are stored, engulfing one of them in flames. You'll have to check it out yourself for those details.

But we don't mind awarding Denton County's election administrator, Don Alexander, BRAD BLOG's "Understatement of the Year Award" for this quoted comment from the story:

Don Alexander, elections administrator for Denton County, said that the company has a history of having problems.

“Diebold does not have a good reputation,” Alexander said.

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