When: Thursday, November 18, 2004, 10:00 a.m. PST

What: A research team at UC Berkeley will report that irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000 - 260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods. Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance — the probability is less than 0.1 percent. The research team, led by Professor Michael Hout, will formally disclose results of the study at the press conference.

Election officials in one Ohio county found that about 2,600 ballots were double-counted, and two other counties have discovered possible cases of people voting twice in the presidential election.

…[Sandusky County elections director Barb] Tuckerman believes the votes were counted twice when they were mistakenly placed alongside a pile of uncounted ballots. The room where the ballots were being fed into optical-scan machines on election night was so crowded that ballots had to be placed on the floor, Tuckerman said.

“It was totally hectic,” she said.

The problem was discovered when Tuckerman found that one precinct showed 131 percent of registered voters had cast ballots.

Opponents of slot machines at South Florida pari-mutuel venues have filed a lawsuit seeking an official recount of about 78,000 absentee ballots cast in Broward County on Amendment 4 in the Nov. 2 election.

The votes in question were counted late on election night after a glitch was discovered in the computers tallying absentees. About 94 percent of the new votes on Amendment 4 turned out to be “yes” and 6 percent “no” — an outcome No Casinos officials claim is a “statistical anomaly” that calls the count into question…

Voters in Utah County had more than a one in five chance that their ballots did not get counted in the initial, unofficial tally from Election Day.

A programming glitch in the punch-card counter dropped 33,000 ballots from the totals - all of them straight-party ballots. That was more than 22 percent of the 145,769 ballots cast in the Republican stronghold.

“The card readers were fine; it was just the way it was programmed initially,” Utah County elections coordinator Kristen Swensen said Friday. “It was just off by one letter.”

The ballots were recounted Wednesday and the 33,000 missing votes were distributed to the candidates for whom they were cast. Despite the large amount of votes involved, the goof - and subsequent fix - did not change the outcome in any race, Swensen said.