Mecklenburg Co.''s Voting Machine Malfunctions in May and November 2006

Mecklenburg County's election department sent me their trouble reports for the May primary and November General Election.

The report lists the many different problems with the touch-screens and their tempermental thermal printers, printers that often jammed or failed.

The NC Coalition for Verified Voting predicted these problems in advance and had urged all NC counties to purchase the tried and true optical scan systems and not the touch-screen machines. (See www.ncvoter.net )

23 of our NC counties use the ES&S iVotronic RTAL touch-screens.
The other 77 use the more mature and lower tech optical scan voting machines.

(Mecklenburg is the county that had 10 touch-screen machines with no voter verified paper printouts in the May, 2006 primary.)

Mecklenburg County has 513,513 reg voters and
190 polling places.

They used 1,076 "panels" (machines I think) used.

Here are the types of problems, by category and quantity not listed here

Paper jams, screen freezes, programming errors etc listed.
Panel would not charge.
Screen freeze.
Out of calibration.
Printer folding edge of paper.
Flash error/CRC error
Power shut down.
Printer frozen/power issue
Half of screen missing.
"Locked up".
CJ could not open panel
Battery low.
Printer door won't lock.
Corrupted flashcard - message.
Pct wkrs could not change paper roll.
RTAL not found - message
Panel beeping, screen frozen.
Chirping, but dead.
4 panels had printers not working
No response on 3 machines

Broken leg.
Panel fell/release latch won't work.
Panel would not accept Master PEB.
Ballot will not display.
Goes directly to Party Select when Master -
ADA programmed wrong.
Paper roll on backwards
Can't make selections when press screen.
ADA problem, audio tried - blank screen.
Time setting is off by 1 hour

http://www.ncvoter.net/downloads/Mecklenburg_2006_Trouble_Report.pdf