The system, in use since 1992, uses paper ballots on which voters fill in an arrow pointing to their candidate. The ballots are fed into a counting machine at each precinct. If the machine detects an overvote in any race, or if it detects a blank ballot, an alarm beeps and the ballot is spit back out. Systems such as the one used in Orange have dramatically reduced the number of flawed ballots, compared with counties that use punch-card ballots or paper ballots simply dropped into precinct ballot boxes and taken to election headquarters to be counted. Those methods, known as centrally tabulated systems, give no warning of mismarked ballots, and voters never get a chance to correct them.
Precinct tabulators are like safety nets that catch voters' mistakes before it's too late.
But in Precinct 605, the net had a huge hole in it. The voting-machine tape from that precinct shows that none of the voters whose mistakes were detected by the machine was given a new ballot. In every case when the alarm sounded for an overvoted or blank ballot, it was spit back out like a bad ATM card. That happened 111 times. But each time, the tabulator inspector simply pressed an override button that sucked the bad ballot back into the machine, where it would not be counted, the tape showed.