Sarasota: Problems slow counting of 10,000 ballots on Diebold Op-Scan

September 03, 2008

August 26, 2008
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Problems with one of the scanning machines that counts absentee ballots have slowed the tally of 10,000 votes in the primary election.

Sarasota County elections staff uses two scanning machines to count absentee ballots. One had no trouble uploading its tallies into the new Premiere election system. The other could not upload the tallies.After a half-hour of trying to fix the problem, Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent announced about 8:55 p.m. that her staff would manually enter the vote tallies into the new system. She said the process would take 15 to 20 minutes.