Vote machines in the clear

PROVO — Don't blame Utah's new electronic voting system for the glitch that attacked 112 of 118 polling locations in Utah County on Election Day.

Instead, an analysis showed that fault lies within a database used for a shortcut taken by county employees, who revealed the problem Monday during a hearing to certify the county election results.

"It was our problem," said Neil Peterson, director of the Utah County Information Systems Department. "There was nothing wrong with the machines, nothing wrong with the voter card encoders and nothing wrong with the voter cards."

The Diebold Elections System immediately caught the problem when the first people tried to vote on Nov. 7. The voting machines provided an error message 80 percent of the time or brought up the wrong precinct number.

The problem ground the election to a halt. Hundreds of people stood in line for up to 90 minutes after polls were supposed to open at 7 a.m. Poll workers had to implement a backup system that downloaded the correct information onto the voter card encoders.

An unknown number of would-be voters left polling places before a backup system was activated, and some claim they never got to vote because they had to leave for work and couldn't return before polls closed at 8 p.m.

The shortcut that caused the problem used a backup elections database that appeared to be identical to the actual database. The original database had been locked down when early voting began and couldn't be used to program the voter card encoders. The backup database turned out to be slightly different and caused the Voter Card Encoder machines to encode voter cards with the wrong precinct. Most were off by just one precinct.

Staffers conducted a test of the system before the general election, but they used the same backup database for the test that they used to program the encoders.

Salt Lake County used the same shortcut, but its alternate database was identical to the original, and there were no problems with the voter card encoders, said Sherrie Swensen, Salt Lake County clerk.

A detailed review of the voting showed that 40 votes at Cherry Hill Elementary School in Orem might have been cast using the wrong ballot format. The only races affected were for Utah House Districts 60 and 61. One vote involving the same races may have been impacted at Westmore Elementary in Orem. Neither state house race was close, and the Utah County Election Canvass Board voted unanimously Monday to certify all of the county elections.