Long election night likely

Problems with Sacramento County voting machines will stall Feb. 5's election results for hours. Results may not come until well after your morning coffee – the next day, county elections officials said Wednesday.

"It might be slow, but it will be accurate," offered Brad Buyse, a spokesman for the local election office.

He said the county discovered problems with the equipment used to count ballots in neighborhood polling places a couple weeks ago.

Because the machines didn't fail previous "logic and accuracy tests," Buyse said there is no reason to believe previous results are tainted.

State law requires that county voting equipment be tested prior to each election.

"We've never had any problem with them when we used them before – that is why it's kind of baffling," Buyse said.

Local and state officials said no other county has reported the problem. "We have not heard of any similar problems this far," said Nicole Winger, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state.

After days working with the ballot printer and election machine vendor to try to solve the problem – and Feb. 5's presidential primary only days away – elections officials decided to take the faulty machines out of the mix.

So rather than scan ballots at each of the county's 548 polling places, ballots will be taken back to the central office and tabulated using larger, faster machines that have passed required tests.

Tuesday election results usually come in by midnight. This time around, it could be 9 a.m. Wednesday "before all the ballots are counted, Buyse said.

The contingency plan will not only delay the local results by up to eight hours, it also removes one post-Florida 2000 election safeguard.

Scanning the ballots on the spot allows voters to know their ballots aren't botched by voting for too many candidates in the same race.

"Undervoting" and "overvoting" came to national attention during the disputed results of the 2000 presidential election.

Undervoting occurs when voters – either by choice or confusion – don't mark a selection in a contest.

Overvoting occurs when voters mark too many selections in the same contest.

Buyse said voters can feel confident previous elections aren't "tainted" by faulty machines.

In addition to the standard pre-election testing, after the vote 1 percent of ballots are counted by hand to ensure the manual results match the computer count.

"That is another safeguard that we have set," Buyse said. "With the safeguards in place we are confident this has never happened before in Sacramento County."

Winger said the county has taken the appropriate action.

"It is better to be right than fast," Winger said. "That is the right thing to do when the goal is to ensure the accuracy of the vote."

Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, said the county is "handling it well."

"The process is working the way it's supposed to," said Alexander, whose Sacramento nonprofit follows election technology issues. "All of those ballots can be counted at the county election office."

She said the only potential harm is that voters won't be protected from overvoting.

Buyse said the staff is baffled because they've used Elections Systems & Software machines without incident for the last seven elections.

The ballot printer Consolidated Printing, of Berkeley, also has been used in the past, Buyse said.

Buyse said they're hoping to add a sixth and seventh central tabulating machine to the mix, if they can be obtained and pass accuracy tests.

In the meantime, the county continues to investigate the errors.

"We truly don't know what the problem is – whether it's the ballot printing, the (equipment) vendor, or both," Buyse said. "It's just flabbergasted us."

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