By Brad Friedman on 5/24/2008, 2:07pm PT  

Please pay attention, people.

Another race, the second in a week, has now been overturned in Arkansas due to failures of the ES&S voting machines (here was the other we reported earlier in the week).

Says the candidate who ended up losing in the very-low-turnout race after the ES&S machine failure was discovered: "What's going to happen in November when there's a presidential race and there's all sorts of people here. This was a 1,500 person turnout. What's going to happen when there's a 20,000 turnout?"

What's going to happen indeed. Arkansas is quickly becoming Florida/Ohio, it seems. Worse, these very same, oft-failed ES&S machines are used all over the country.

Here's coverage from the Arkansas paper [emphasis ours]...

The Faulkner County Election Commission has determined that Linda Tyler is the winner of the House District 45 election.

The new outcome, according to Election Commission Chair Bruce Haggard, is Tyler, 792 votes; Dr. Terry Fiddler, 764 votes.

"I want to apologize personally and on behalf of the election commissioners and the county clerk for these recording errors that were made on election night," Haggard said, adding that the commission will conduct an audit "to find out what went wrong" and ensure the mistakes made Tuesday night never happen again.
...
The election commission also discovered an error in the East Cadron B precinct machine that caused votes cast in the Cadron Township Constable race for John Edwards and Paul Niehaus to be "dropped into" the District 45 race, Haggard said. He said he did not know whether this mistake was caused by an error within the machine or an error by the person who programmed the machine.
...
"As a result of that one precinct, where the constable race results were placed in the District 45 results, Tyler lost 6 and Fiddler lost 51," Haggard said.

The result was "a net change of 16 plus for Tyler, minus 35 for Fiddler," he said.
...
Fiddler said he does not dispute the result of the process, but is disappointed that given the significant expense of electronic voting machines, "this is what we get."
...
"She won the race. I'm not questioning that. What's going to happen in November when there's a presidential race and there's all sorts of people here. This was a 1,500 person turnout. What's going to happen when there's a 20,000 turnout?..."
...
[Haggard] said an audit would involve going back through everything in the election process, which is stored in an election audit file. The audit will be supervised by a representative of Election Systems and Software, the company that sells the voting machines, he said.

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Article Categories: ES&S, Election Irregularities, Arkansas, Election 2008