Andrew over at Freedom to Tinker, with the kind of problem that is not going to be caught by a typical post election audit:
In the November 2020 election in Williamson County, Texas, flawed e-pollbook software resulted in voters inadvertently voting for candidates and questions not from their own districts but from others in the same county. These voters were deprived of the opportunity to vote for candidates they were entitled to vote for—and their votes were wrongly counted in elections that they shouldn’t have voted in. This wasn’t the voters’ fault, but it does mean that the results in elections for local offices were affected by this screwup by Tenex Software Solutions. Tenex’s e-pollbook malfunctions call into question the results of the 2020 school district races, municipal elections, potentially a county commissioners race, and state legislative races in Williamson County.
As more and more states use e-pollbooks in vote centers, election administrators should understand this failure, because it could potentially affect any kind of e-pollbook that prints ballots on demand.
I’ve written about other screwups caused by election software or hardware—in Antrim County MI, in Windham NH, in Mercer County NJ—but in all those cases, voters marked the paper ballots they were entitled to vote on, and election officials can and did recount those ballots to report accurate election results. That is, all those screwups were recoverable, and election officials took immediate action to recount and recover—to get an accurate result.
But in Williamson County, the mistake was unrecoverable. Once the voters have been given the wrong ballots, then no amount of recounting can recover a fully valid election result. Because all these voters were in the same county, this screwup did not affect any countywide offices, statewide offices, or the Presidential election: any countywide or statewide candidate would be on every ballot in the county, so all those votes could be cast and counted accurately. But for local races and referendum questions, and for state legislative districts, voters registered in those localities did not seem to be the ones actually voting….
Read the whole thing.