TALLAHASSEE - Touchscreen voting machines in 11 counties have a software flaw that could make manual recounts impossible in November's presidential election.
The machines, made by Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb., fail to provide a consistent electronic "event log" of the voting activity when asked to reproduce what happened during the election, state officials said.
The counties using the machines are Broward, Charlotte, Collier, Lake, Lee, Martin, Miami-Dade, Nassau, Pasco, Sarasota and Sumter.
Officials with the state Division of Elections and ES&S say they may have found a remedy for the problem. It involves linking the voting equipment with laptop computers to extract the information.
The federal Help America Vote Act, drawn up in response to the contested presidential election of 2000, requires that every voting system be able to produce a permanent paper record with a manual audit capacity.
