During the last presidential election, there were at least 171 votes counted from people who don’t exist.

The phantom votes were recorded at the Church of the Ascension at 11201 SW 160th St. in Cutler Ridge. On Nov. 2, 2004, when voters were casting ballots on a host of decisions, including whether or not George W. Bush deserved another term as president or if the job should be handed over to John Kerry, the Church of the Ascension was known as Precinct 816. And unlike the last presidential election, when voters made their choices by punching holes through cardboard-like cards, Precinct 816 and precincts all over the state of Florida were computerized. Miami-Dade County is among the counties in Florida that used computer touch screens known as iVotronics. When it was time to shut them down, it became apparent that one of the machines was having problems, according to a report from the Audit and Management Services Department nearly a year later. The problem, it was determined, was that the votes collected by at least one faulty machine in that precinct were counted not once, but three times.

Because almost every contest polled at Precinct 816 was decided by a minimum of 10,000 votes statewide, the 171 extra votes did not affect the outcome of any race, according to the audit report.

“Nonetheless, these processing errors are particularly troubling, because hardware error-handling logic did not display appropriate warning messages, which greatly complicated troubleshooting efforts,” Audit Director Cathy Jackson wrote in her Sept. 30, 2005 report.

Members of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition (MDERC), a nonpartisan grassroots organization dedicated to election reform that seeks to make sure every vote cast is “accurately recorded and counted,” point out the discrepancies would have never been discovered in the first place if the group didn’t have observers present who noticed something was amiss.

In MDERC’s own report on May 25, 2005, titled “Get It Right the First Time,” volunteers found multiple instances where the signatures collected by poll workers and votes collected by iVotronic machines did not match.

“This failing, in one egregious instance in Precinct 816, permitted unintentional ballot stuffing when the votes deposited in one voting machine were added to the total count multiple times, without being detected or corrected,” the MDERC report stated.

Lester Sola, supervisor of Miami-Dade Elections, said new procedures and upgrades in technology have been developed to address discrepancies and prevent a repeat of November 2004. He also blamed the errors of Precinct 816 on a technician who continuously uploaded the votes.

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