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Presidential Elections - AP
Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes 

COLUMBUS, Ohio - An error with an electronic voting system gave
President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections
officials said.

Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to
Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show
only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.

Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder,
director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus
Dispatch.

State and county election officials did not immediately respond to
requests by The Associated Press for more details about the voting
system and its vendor, and whether the error, if repeated elsewhere in
Ohio, could have affected the outcome.

Bush won the state by more than 136,000 votes, according to unofficial
results, and Kerry conceded the election on Wednesday after
acknowledging that 155,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted in
Ohio would not change the result.

The Secretary of State's Office said Friday it could not revise Bush's
total until the county reported the error.

The Ohio glitch is among a handful of computer troubles that have
emerged since Tuesday's elections.

In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because
officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots
electronically could hold more data than it did. And in San Francisco,
a malfunction with custom voting software could delay efforts to
declare the winners of four races for county supervisor.

In the Ohio precinct in question, the votes are recorded onto a
cartridge. On one of the three machines at that precinct, a
malfunction occurred in the recording process, Damschroder said. He
could not explain how the malfunction occurred.

Damschroder said people who had seen poll results on the election
board's Web site called to point out the discrepancy. The error would
have been discovered when the official count for the election is
performed later this month, he said.

The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race on
the machine.

Workers checked the cartridge against memory banks in the voting
machine and each showed that 115 people voted for Bush on that
machine. With the other machines, the total for Bush in the precinct
added up to 365 votes.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a glitch occurred with software designed
for the city's new "ranked-choice voting," in which voters list their
top three choices for municipal offices. If no candidate gets a
majority of first-place votes outright, voters' second and third-place
preferences are then distributed among candidates who weren't
eliminated in the first round.

When the San Francisco Department of Elections tried a test run on
Wednesday of the program that does the redistribution, some of the
votes didn't get counted and skewed the results, director John Arntz
said.

"All the information is there," Arntz said. "It's just not arriving
the way it was supposed to."

A technician from the Omaha, Neb. company that designed the software,
Election Systems & Software Inc., was working to diagnose and fix the
problem.