Part of the 'undervote' problem could have been voter error.

Part of the 'undervote' problem could have been voter error.
MERCER, Pa. -- A half-hour pre-election test would have caught the programming error that caused Election Day problems in Mercer County, says the president of the company that sold the county its voting machines.
Jack Gerbel, president of Unilect Corp., Dublin, Calif., said Monday that if a manual test had been run for each of the six ballots used in the county's Nov. 2 general election, the problem would have become evident. "It's a simple test. It should have been done. Obviously, it wasn't," he said.
That error caused machines to malfunction in the 13 precincts included in the 4th Congressional District, causing many lost votes. No one knows exactly how many votes were lost, and Gerbel said Monday that because of the programming error, all results in those precincts are questionable.
The committee investigating the election quizzed Gerbel at length by speaker phone at Monday's meeting. The eight-member committee was appointed by Mercer County commissioners, who comprise the election board, to find out what went wrong and make recommendations to prevent future problems.
He insisted his machines were not the problem, stating that Mercer has used them successfully since 2000 and that Greene and Beaver counties also use them: "Our equipment works perfectly. It only does what it is told to do," he said.
Undervotes
The committee also wanted to know why the number of undervotes on the Unilect equipment is higher than on other voting machines. Undervote is the term being used to describe the a situation in which a person voted but didn't cast a ballot for president.
Gerbel explained that the apparent failure of more voters on the Unilect system to vote for president results from a ballot presentation required in Pennsylvania. When a voter selects the straight-party ballot, names of all candidates of that party become highlighted. If the voter presses a highlighted candidate's name again, his vote for that candidate is eliminated.
Gerbel said the confusion happens because Pennsylvania requires voters who vote straight-party ballots to page through the entire ballot anyway. When voters see their preferred candidates names again, some become confused and press them, actually eliminating their vote for that candidate.
However, he pointed out that the current software already gives voters three separate warnings stating their selected candidates' names must remain highlighted to be tallied.