05 November 2004

Computer Loses More Than 4,000 Early Votes

November 5, 2004

Jacksonville, N.C. -- More than 4,500 Carteret County votes have been lost because officials believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did.

Scattered other problems may change results in local races around the state.

Carteret officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of the county's electronic voting system, said each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes.

When they tried to store more than 7,500 early votes in the unit, some 4,530 were lost.

Jack Gerbel, president and owner of Dublin-Calif.-based UniLect, told The Associated Press on Thursday that the county's elections board was given incorrect information.

There is no way to retrieve the missing data, he said.

"That is the situation and it's definitely terrible," he said.

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