E-Vote machines have already eaten votes

In 2000 there was a little publicized incident in New Mexico. Hundred of votes for President disappeared from from electronic voting machines in one county and could not be recovered. They may have cost Bush the state electors. The cause - programming error.

Washington Post: Four years ago, about 2,300 voters traveled the winding roads through this remote county to cast their ballots before Election Day on state-of-the-art, push-button electronic voting machines. For 678 of them, their votes were never recorded.

The Washington Post examined the voting results here because New Mexico had the narrowest winning margin in the presidential contest, and Rio Arriba County had the largest percentage of voters who had no presidential vote. The review discovered that 203 voters turned out in one of Rio Arriba's voting districts, but the state's certified results show "0" votes were recorded for Gore or Bush. The same was true for the U.S. Senate and House candidates. In another district, two-thirds of those who voted in the month before Election Day -- early voting is allowed in New Mexico -- had no votes recorded in any races. Steve Fresquez, a state computer technician who oversaw vote counts for Rio Arriba County, said the electronic machines had been programmed incorrectly for early voters, but it was not discovered until days after the election.

Rio Arriba County has three voting districts -- the candidates for state legislature in each are different -- but for early voters the county used just one ballot listing the names of all the candidates.

"There was no way we could get the correct votes because that was how they programmed the machine," Fresquez said.

Fresquez said the county had only two early-voting locations. Rather than programming separate machines at each location for the county's different voting districts, Rio Arriba tried to program one machine to cover all the districts. "They were trying to use less machines," he said. "They thought they could put it all on one ballot. They were not aware of" any problem.

In one district, none of the 203 ballots cast were recorded for Bush or Gore. In another, 188 of the 569 voters cast a presidential vote. The third district had a more typical pattern, with 1,500 of the 1,594 voters recording a presidential choice.

New Mexico is the only state to have an elaborate, three-step audit process of voting results. Precinct results are checked by the county and state and then by a certified public accounting firm. The federal Election Assistance Commission, established after the 2000 Florida recount to help states establish new voting systems, has cited the audit as a "best practice" to be used elsewhere.

Lamb testified to the commission that the "triple audit" would alert the state to problems with the electronic voting machines. Fresquez's work on Rio Arriba's results did uncover the programming error. But it was never publicized.

In fact, the audit could show only that the programming error occurred. There was no way to recount the missed votes. They were simply gone.