After the polls closed last week, one voting machine reported that 724 people had used it, even though officials at the Fairview precinct had recorded only 707 people walking through the door. There was also another voting machine at Fairview, which had already tallied 348 of the 707 votes.

Fairfax County election officials ultimately concluded that supervisor John Cook (R) defeated at-large school board member Ilryong Moon (D) by a slim margin of 89 votes in the Braddock District’s special election March 10.

But for almost 24 hours, officials could not call the race’s outcome or even determine the number of ballots cast in the election because of the malfunctioning machine at the Fairview precinct in Fairfax Station.

When the problematic machine was cracked open the day after the election, a more appropriate number of votes, 359, showed up on a roll of tape in the "ballot log" and among the "ballot images," or digital photographs taken of each vote cast on the machine.

Election officials are still unsure of what caused the voting machine to report the wrong number of votes in the first place.

"Once we ran the ballot log and the ballot images, we saw that there were 359 actual votes on the machine. We just don’t know why the machine tallied up 724. … We have one machine with an anomaly and we don’t know what caused it," said Rokey Suleman, Fairfax County registrar. So far, no one has disputed the results.

By law, Fairfax County is not allowed to touch or tamper with the voting machine for 30 days following the election. At the conclusion of the waiting period, Suleman intends to have the problematic machine investigated to determine what might have gone wrong, he said.

"Nothing like this has ever occurred before. We don’t know if the machine malfunctioned or if we did something wrong," said Suleman.

LAST WEEK’S voting machine problems are a sign of bigger problems ahead, said cyber security expert Jeremy Epstein and other computer scientists.

Fairfax County’s electronic voting machines produce no ballots or paper trail and it would be impossible to verify the number votes or what they were cast for if an electronic voting machine malfunctioned and voting information could not be retrieved. There is no hard copy or paper "back up" system if something goes wrong.

"We are entirely reliant on the software that is in the electronic voting machines to function correctly. … When you have been writing software for 25 years, you know that is not a good thing to do," said Epstein, senior computer scientist with the Cyber Security Research and Development Center at SRI International in Arlington.

Epstein, a Braddock District resident, said an overwhelming majority of computer scientists believe there should be a paper trail for elections that can be independently verified.

"There have been many many bugs in election software over the years and, one day we may not be able to recover from it. This bug may have affected past elections and nobody ever noticed it before. It could have given the wrong number of votes to the wrong candidate and nobody noticed," said Epstein, who advocates for voting machine security both nationally and locally.