Computer Loses 4,500 Votes in N.C.

Found on eWEEK on Thursday, 04 November 2004
Browse Politics

More than 4,500 votes have been lost in one North Carolina county because officials believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. Scattered other problems may change results in races around the state.

Local officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of the county's electronic voting system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes.

Jack Gerbel, president and owner of Dublin, Calif.-based UniLect, said Thursday that the county's elections board was given incorrect information. There is no way to retrieve the missing data, he said.

Nationwide, only scattered problems were reported in electronic voting, though roughly 40 million people cast digital ballots, voting equipment company executives had said.

Either this election really had less problems than the one in 2000, or some people covered their tracks better.