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D.C. Election Glitch Blamed On Equipment
Patrick Mara greets motorists at Foxhall and Reservoir roads NW to thank supporters for his Republican primary victory.
(By Jonathan Newton -- The Washington Post)
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"It was determined that one defective cartridge caused vote totals to be duplicated into multiple races on the summary report issued by our office. The Board immediately caught and addressed this error, as is reflected in the last unofficial results report issued on Election Night," Murphy said in the statement.
He refused to answer questions from reporters, and no members of the election board appeared.
Industry specialists questioned the board's explanation.
"That press release is a model of obfuscation," said Henry E. Brady, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley who has studied voting systems extensively, including in the deadlocked 2000 presidential contest.
Cartridges record votes from ballot machines, called optical scanners, and then are fed into a counting system that tallies votes District-wide. The cartridges must be programmed for each election, and the counting software must be able to read the cartridge information.
The explanation that a defective cartridge caused tallying errors across multiple races "is what throws me off," Brady said. "It is hard to know what that means. I'm having trouble figuring out how that happens."
Brady also said he was taken aback that so many write-in votes would have been released even as an unofficial count on election night because "any elections official who has been around for more than three days should know that write-ins never are that frequent. That should have been stopped from going out because someone paused to think, 'This simply cannot be true.' "
Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services, a Virginia consulting firm, said: "It is strange that a single cartridge would cause results to double across the District, and it also would be strange to have that show up in one race. Why wouldn't it have duplicated other contests in that precinct or more than one race?"
The confusion tempered celebrations and delayed congratulations yesterday as council members and candidates and their supporters talked about the mishap. The races for the District's representatives to Congress and for members of the Democratic National Committee were also on the ballot.
The contest to watch, though, was the Republican primary, in which Schwartz, 64, was trying to fend off her well-organized and well-financed challenger, Patrick Mara, a 33-year-old government relations manager.
In the end, Mara took 60 percent of the vote to Schwartz's 40 percent.
Republicans make up 7 percent of the District's electorate. Tuesday's citywide GOP race drew 3,735 voters.
