... in a local judicial race and revealed grave problems in the county's election infrastructure, including thousands of misplaced ballots and vote tabulation machines that are literally unable to produce the same results twice.

However, some voters chose not to cast their ballots until the machines are working.

About 10 voters showed up at the election office Monday in Beaufort, but only two cast paper ballots, said Agnes Garvin, head of the county elections office, adding most decided to return when the machines are functioning.

They "will be up and running (today)," she said.

Specifically, the law provides that county clerks are to compare the total votes tallied in the general election for the office of president or governor from a random selection of 2% of the voting systems used during the election throughout the state to a hand count of the ballots cast on that system. A voting system is defined as a vote-tabulating machine.

The close working partnership between Holly Lowder and John Paulsen has been well-known for years among Colorado county clerks and state election workers.
Lowder, who resigned as state elections director this month, helped launch Paulsen's government contractor business in 1993 when she bought his voter registration software for Alamosa County.
She was Alamosa County clerk for about 25 years and held several state leadership positions.
Paulsen, owner of LEDS LLC, went on to sell his software to more than 30 counties.

Residents of Virginia, Kentucky and Georgia are among the first in the nation eligible to vote in person, as well as by mail. During the next few weeks, at least 34 states and the District of Columbia will allow early in-person voting for Nov. 4 elections.

The crush of voters will strain a system already in the midst of transformation, with jurisdictions introducing new machines and rules to avoid the catastrophe of the deadlocked 2000 election and the lingering controversy over the 2004 outcome. Even within the past few months, cities and counties have revamped their processes: Nine million voters, including many in the battleground states of Ohio, Florida and Colorado, will use equipment that has changed since March.
But the widespread changes meant to reassure the public have also increased the potential for trouble.

 
This year marks the first time that new, statewide, centralized voter-registration databases will be used in a federal election in a number of states.
The databases were mandated in the 2002 Help America Vote Act, which required all election districts in a state or U.S. territory to consolidate their lists into a single database electronically accessible to every election office in the state or territory.

She said technicians from ES&S have about 48 hours to get the machines set up properly, and that the problem "seems to be the ink," but that nobody is certain.

NIST's guidelines address the relevant Help America Vote Act requirements, but leave much undefined, GAO found. For example, NIST's approach does not cite explicit qualifications for the personnel who conduct accreditation and technical assessments of the labs and, therefore, play a major role in accreditation decisions.