|
Was GEC's tabulation error technical or human?
|
by Jason Salas, KUAM News
Sunday, January 06, 2008
|
KUAM Video requires Flash 8.
download it Here.
|
|
d2k8
The last few local elections have been replete with controversy, from 1998's ballot tampering scandal to the unforgettable overvote conundrum that plagued 2006. So it was with a bit of optimism that those managing the Decision 2008 special election approached yesterday's voting, hoping the abbreviated state would mean less contention. But as Super Saturday became Sunday and the tallying neared completion, an issue with the counting was revealed.
The big concern quickly became determining if the nature of the snafu was caused by a technical glitch or human error.
"We completed all the tallying of the votes and unfortunately we had a glitch in one of the machines," explained John Terlaje. "All precincts had been counted; we're just unable to extract the numbers." The chairman of the Guam Election Commission's board of directors noted how after a long day of managing the polls and then counting the cast ballots, staffers, registrars and volunteers mustered enough energy to run one last batch of results this morning, releasing the unofficial final tabulations for the special election.
A systems error attributed to "data oversight" prohibited the 54 island voting precincts from being fully quantified when the agency closed up shop at Election Central just after 1am. This glitch reportedly prohibited approximately a tenth of the ballots from being extracted from the data files containing the counts. Again, Terlaje assured, "All the precincts have been counted. We're just unable to extract that number. But they have all been counted already."
These phantom results included tallies from districts in Santa Rita, Chalan Pago, Tamuning, and Yigo - all significant municipalities. MIS administrator Tony Elliot reiterated the presence of the data , pointing out the problem being in the immediate availability of it. "The votes are accessible. Every single vote was counted. It's just that the numbers are interspersed in between the three saved diskettes that I create after so many precincts," he said. "So without taking those numbers and putting them in their proper diskette, you're going to have an overstatement of the votes."
So the main question, not surprisingly, became: what exactly led to this omission? Board member Joe Mesa asked of Elliot, "I'd like an explanation for how this occurred. How did this happen?" to which he admitted, "I was probably distracted. I kept close watch on every single one of them except for that moment in time."
49 precincts in all were properly accounted for prior to this morning's last run. Chairman Terlaje told KUAM News although 21,230 ballots were cast, the number of votes counted last night and into this morning do not add up to that amount due to overvotes and undervotes. So while the GEC's best laid plans went slightly awry, the spoiled ballots were eventually accounted for as staffers took the machines downtown to retrieve the information within the machines.
The GEC has penciled in a meeting for this Wednesday at 4pm, during which time the results will be certified.
View the latest election results
View the UOG exit poll results
|