ADVERTISEMENTS

As Santa Fe County, New Mexico, was testing its machines last Friday, officials found a programming error that would have prevented its optical-scan machines from recording votes cast in the presidential, U.S. Senate or 3rd Congressional District races on ballots where voters cast a straight-party ticket.

The error occurred in the ballot definition files that were programmed for use in optical-scan machines made by Election Systems & Software. The ballot definition file, which is newly programmed for each election, tells the machine database to which candidate's tally it should distribute votes read from the ballot.

The problem was discovered while officials were preparing the machines for early voting, which begins in Santa Fe County October 18. The glitch would only have affected voters who opted to vote a straight-party ticket -- that is, voters who filled in an oval on the ballot indicating that they wanted to vote across the board for all of the candidates from a given party.

Santa Fe County, a heavily Democratic county, was the only county where the error showed up, according to Automated Election Services, a local company that contracts to the state and counties to print ballots, program machine memory cards and do other services. The issue was caught by county officials during pre-election machine testing that is standard in all New Mexico counties.

Memory cards on all of the county's tabulating machines contained the error, since they were programmed the same way. The error occurred because a programmer failed to include the presidential, senate and congressional races in the code instructing the machines how to handle straight-party tickets.

Although New Mexico offers presidential candidates only 5 electoral votes, the state is expected to be a crucial battleground in November. In the 2000 presidential election, Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore won the state by 366 votes.

Bloggers, promote your law blog by nominating your blog for inclusion in USLaw.com's Law Blog Directory and RSS Reader. Benefits described.