Over the last few weeks I’ve spent the time to go through all of the tabulator machine tapes for Prince William County VA, which are made available by the PWC Registrar and scans of which are posted on the pwcvotes.org website. Our sincere thanks to the PWC Registrar for posting these for public inspection, and we encourage other Registrars to do the same or similar.
The excel file with all of the machine tape results entered, as well as corresponding tabs with the corresponding parsed results from the Dept of Elections JSON and CSV result reports is available below. The first tab of the linked excel file lists all of the machine tapes and notes where discrepancies exist.
Thankfully, there were only a few very small discrepancies noted between the machine tape reports and the results reported by the Virginia department of elections. The maximum discrepancy of 18 ballots was associated with the proposed constitutional amendment contest, and can be attributed to two individuals utilizing the federal only ballot, which I confirmed with via phone conversation with the PWC registrar.
This discrepancy can most clearly be seen in the Burke-Nickens machine tape shown below, where the sum total number of votes in the Constitutional amendment section does not equal the total number of ballots recorded by the tabulator. (This is highlighted in orange in the linked excel file.)
Note that the second line from the bottom shows that the number of “Pcts/Splits Total” is equal to 2. This means that there were two different ballot styles utilized with this tabulator. Two of those ballots were federal only, so they did not have the section for voting on the VA Constitutional amendment. So while the total ballot counter at the top of the tape reads 475, the total number of ballots cast for the constitutional amendment was 473.