Overworked computer crashes as votes tallied

Thursday, Nov. 7, 2002 | 11:20 a.m.

SUN CAPITAL BUREAU

CARSON CITY -- Computer problems bedeviled the secretary of state's office on election night.

The computer system that counts the statewide votes crashed shortly after polls closed Tuesday night, apparently from unexpected over-use, Deputy Secretary of State Renee Parker said. It took about two hours to get it running again, she said.

The website with election results had 311,662 hits that night, Parker said.

The state has one server for the elections division, which is used to both count results and run the website, spokesman Steve George said. A new server was to be added and could have prevented the breakdown, but it was not purchased because of the state's budget cuts, George said.

One possible reason for the failure, Parker said, may have been the national interest in the question on the Nevada ballot to legalize 3 ounces of marijuana. There may have been a lot of hits from outside the state, she said.

Because the server went down, state election workers went to a more old-fashioned way, George said. Counties were asked to fax the results and they were manually put into the state's computers to be counted.

Nye County was the last county to post its results to the state, about 2:40 a.m., George said.

Once the results were marked as final on the website, results for None of These Candidates were missing from the statewide offices for Clark County, an error not discovered until the next morning.

Results from Clark County were the only ones automatically transmitted into the state system, George said. But the state's operation did not receive the count for None of These Candidates. They were entered manually the next morning.

Results remain unofficial until county commissions in the 17 counties must canvass, which must be done by Nov. 12, and the state Supreme Court accepts the results on Nov. 27, George said.