10:41 PM EST on Thursday, November 4, 2004

Associated Press

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.

In a letter to county officials, he blamed the mistake on confusion over which model of the voting machines were in use in Carteret County. But he also noted that the machines flash a warning message when there is no more room for storing ballots.

"Evidently, this message was either ignored or overlooked," he wrote.

County election officials were meeting with State Board of Elections Executive Director Gary Bartlett and other state elections officials on Thursday and did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.

Expecting the greater capacity, the county only used one unit during the early voting period. "If we had known, we would have had the units to handle the votes," said Sue Verdon, secretary of the county election board.

The loss of the votes didn't appear to change the outcome of the county races, but that wasn't the issue for Alecia Williams of Beaufort, who voted on one of the final days of the early voting period.

"The point is not whether the votes would have changed things, it's that they didn't get counted at all," Williams said.

Two statewide races remained undecided Thursday. The candidates for superintendent of public instruction are divided by about 6,700 votes out of 3.2 million cast. Candidates for agriculture commissioner are separated by just hundreds of votes, according to unofficial figures. The state deadline for official totals is Tuesday.

Still, it would be hard to say what affect those races might feel from changes in individual counties. The deputy director of the State Board of Elections, Johnnie McLean, said Thursday that the state still must tally 73,118 provisional ballots, plus those from four counties that have not yet submitted their provisionals.

In other local voting problems:

— A discrepancy was reported in the number of early votes cast in Mecklenburg County, which includes Charlotte. Before the election, the county election office said 102,109 people voted early or returned valid absentee ballots. Unofficial results from election night showed 106,064 of those votes.

Elections director Michael Dickerson said he was unsure if there was a problem but election officials had not lost any votes. He noted the results were not official yet.

A recount could change results in county commission races.

— In Craven County, all vote totals in nine of the county's 26 precincts were electronically doubled. The results of most races isn't expected to be affected.

"It was a glitch," said Tiffiney Miller, director of the Craven County Board of Elections. "The machines went and accumulated those [electronic ballots] again when we added in the absentee votes, but it did it for each candidate so it is a marginal error and shouldn't affect the outcome of any race."

— In Onslow County, a software error changed the order of finish in the race for seats on the county commission. The error didn't change who won the seats, just the order in which they finished.

A floppy disk that compiles voting data from the counting machines was programmed incorrectly, said Kim Strach, a deputy director with the state Board of Elections.