Computer glitch causes inflation

The numbers from Tuesday’s municipal elections didn’t look good. But they looked better than they should have.

While waiting for the election results to come in at the Iredell Board of Elections offices Tuesday night, talk among the handful of people who gathered drifted briefly to the 2000 presidential election and ballot-counting fiasco that took place in Florida.

Johnny Eisele, the brother-in-law of Ward 3 candidate Bonita Eisele, was pacing around the room elections officials had set up as a waiting area, and his brother, Jim Eisele, was working the cell phone.

“They told us we would know the count two minutes after they got the ballots,” said Johnny Eisele.

But the count was taking too long.

“This could be a case of hanging chads,” joked Jim Eisele.

At about 8:55 p.m. Tuesday - nearly an hour and a half after the polls had closed - Polly Cook, the county’s deputy elections director, came in with the numbers.

But they were much higher than the preliminary tabulations that had been floating around the elections office.

It turns out there was a reason for that.

“Something happened with the software,” said Iredell Board of Elections Director Becky Galliher.

Galliher was quick to point out that the computer glitch did not affect who won, just the vote count.

“Nothing changes as far as the winners are concerned,” Galliher said.

Galliher said things seemed a little strange.

“We really should have caught this. But we were so busy that it didn’t click,” Galliher explained Wednesday. “The turnout just seemed too high.”

But the two computer systems used to calculate the final tallies in the four Statesville City Council races that were contested told her they were right.

Bonita Eisele and Ward 6 incumbent Flake Huggins still won in convincing fashion. And the numbers were recorded properly in Ward 1 and Ward 4, where incumbents Paula Steele and Michael Johnson, respectively, ran unopposed.

But somewhere between the data that was entered and the data that came out, the number of people who actually voted on Tuesday had doubled in the two wards that were being contested.

Galliher said the problem was not in the counting or the recording of the votes but only in the report that was printed out.

In Eisele’s case, the initial reports indicated she had tallied 96 votes - 30 early votes and 66 on election day. She actually had a total of only 63 votes.

The computer did the same thing with the votes of the two other Ward 3 candidates.

The end result is that Eisele’s percentage of victory actually went up, from, about 55 percent of the total to nearly 61 percent.

In Ward 6, Huggins total votes dropped from 243 to 124 and his portion of the vote from 52 percent to 51 percent.

“I feel bad this happened,” said Galliher. “But I want people to know we caught it on our first audit. I don’t want them to think there is a problem with the voting machines because there is not.”

The bottom line on the total voter turnout in the four wards was that only 5.5 percent of the registered voters there voted.

If voter apathy is a concern, perhaps the most telling of these races was in Ward 3, where only 105 of the ward’s 1,564 people - 6.7 percent -turned out to cast ballots.

The race featured three new candidates contesting a vacant seat.

The Ward 3 turnout was less than the combined totals in wards 1 and 4, where 157 people cast votes that were essentially not needed.

In all, 505 people voted in the election out of a total of 9,119 registered voters in the four wards, or 5.5 percent.

Galliher said she and her staff will conduct a “hand-to-eye count” of the ballots today in wards 3 and 6.

That shouldn’t take very long.

-By

Posted on 10/11/07 at 11:53 AM
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