Officials may have to have hand count votes after Newton County recount fails electronically

NEWTON COUNTY, Texas (KTRK) -- Election results are still up in the for an east Texas county whose first unofficial results were so inaccurate that the county clerk asked for a judge for a recount.

And now an election tabulation expert told ABC13 that pre-election equipment testing by the county, required by Texas state law, should have caught the error before Election Day.

Douglas W. Jones is a former member of the Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems. He also wrote the book Broken Ballots about the history of voting technology.

He said errors like the one in Newton County are rare but occur more often than they should.

"The logic and accuracy test is not just a cosmetic test. It's your last chance to catch these kinds of errors," Jones told ABC13. "The thing is, this should have been caught in the pre-election testing, a responsibly run election anywhere in the world, if you're using any kind of tabulating technology."

"Even if you're doing it by hand, you should do a dress rehearsal. And that rehearsal is really the last chance to catch proofreading errors and setup errors, and things like that," he said.

In fact, Texas law requires such testing before Election Day.

But on Monday, the Newton County Clerk asked a judge for permission to recount the numbers from both the Republican and Democratic primaries.

RELATED: Texas county starts election recount after "ballot coding error" leads to "skewed" results

The judge approved it, but ABC13 has learned that when representatives from the company and the Secretary of State's office tried to test the equipment, it failed. So, no recount on Monday, and while the clerk's office is not answering the phone, they may be forced to do a hand recount of all ballots from 23 polling places - roughly 2,500 ballots between the Republican and Democratic primaries.

The Secretary of State's office confirmed to ABC13 on Tuesday that no other county in Texas has reported such issues from the March 3rd election.

"But they shouldn't happen at all," Jones said. "There's really no excuse. "

While in Newton County, as of late Tuesday, the results are still as up in the air as they were a week ago, when residents waited after dark to see them.

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