When the results came in for a small Cumberland County, New Jersey Democratic primary in June 2011, Cynthia Zirkle picked up the phone. She knew nearly every voter in her Fairfield Township district personally, and the numbers on the board simply did not add up.
What followed became one of the most thoroughly documented cases of a flipped election result in modern American political history — and it recently re-ignited a fierce national debate after resurfacing on the social media platform X.
The June 7, 2011 primary had been a local affair by any measure. Four candidates competed for two open seats on the Democratic Executive Committee in District 3 of Fairfield Township.
When Cumberland County certified the results, they showed Vivian Henry leading with 34 votes, followed by Mark Henry with 33. Ernest Zirkle — the town’s sitting deputy mayor — received just 9 votes, and his wife Cynthia received 10.
The Zirkles began working the phones. Neighbor by neighbor, voter by voter, a starkly different picture emerged. Twenty-eight residents ultimately signed sworn affidavits stating they had cast their ballots for the Zirkles — not the Henrys.
Armed with those affidavits, the couple took their fight to Superior Court on June 20, 2011, demanding three things: the election results be thrown out, the voting machine be impounded, and any replacement election be conducted with paper ballots.
At the heart of the legal challenge sat a Sequoia AVC Advantage Direct-Recording Electronic voting machine — a paperless system that produced no receipt, no physical record, and no independent means for a voter to confirm their choice had been accurately logged.
The Zirkles’ petition did not mince words about the machine. “The Sequoia AVC Advantage Direct-Recording Electronic Voting Machine utilized at this polling place was obviously not operating properly,” the petition stated.
Their filing also catalogued known deficiencies in Sequoia equipment, including firmware defects, software bugs, hardware faults, and security vulnerabilities.
Their concerns landed on familiar legal ground. The Coalition for Peace Action had filed suit in October 2004, arguing that New Jersey’s touchscreen machines were unconstitutional because voters had no assurance their selections were accurately captured.
CPA chairwoman Irene Goldman weighed in on the Fairfield situation, telling NJ.com the outcome was “very fishy.”
In July 2011, Princeton University computer science professor Andrew Appel — a nationally recognized authority on the Sequoia platform — entered the case as a court-appointed expert witness. His assignment was to examine the machine and all associated evidence.
Appel’s findings confirmed the Zirkles’ suspicions. The candidates’ names had been transposed on the electronic ballot definition, meaning every vote cast for one pair of candidates was recorded for the other. Voters who pressed buttons for the Zirkles were, without their knowledge, handing victory to the Henrys.
The explanation that emerged from county officials pointed to human error. Cumberland County Board of Elections Administrator Lizbeth Hernandez submitted a certification acknowledging that due to a programming mistake, votes cast for the Zirkles had registered for the Henrys, and vice versa.
Hernandez stated she had personally programmed Cumberland County’s voting machines since 2008 as a cost-saving measure, and that she had inadvertently placed the Henrys’ ballot positions onto those designated for the Zirkles.
Voting machine technicians who subsequently tested the cartridge failed to catch the error before Election Day.
Appel, however, could not close the case on intent. His investigation could not establish whether the transposition was a genuine mistake or something deliberate.
He noted that an unauthorized individual — operating either through internet access to the WinEDS voting software laptop or through direct physical access — could have executed the same swap of ballot files.
Then the investigation struck a wall. Critical files on the county Board of Elections laptop were deleted on August 16, 2011 — the day before Appel was scheduled to examine it.
County technician Jason Cossaboon described the deletion as routine maintenance performed to address the machine’s sluggish processing speed.
“At no time did I delete any information concerning the programming of the voting machine,” Cossaboon swore in a signed statement. When Appel arrived the following morning, he discovered the computer’s history log had been wiped entirely.
Superior Court Judge David Krell did not hide his reaction. Krell stated from the bench that he had “suspicions that something that happened here was improper” and referred the matter to the state Attorney General’s criminal justice division for potential prosecution.
The referral went nowhere. State criminal investigators reviewed the matter and declined to file charges, according to court filings submitted by a deputy attorney general who was simultaneously representing county officials in the civil case.
The Zirkles’ attorney, Sam Serata, moved for sanctions against the Board of Elections and pushed for an independent investigator. “It smells,” Serata told NJ.com. “If this goes on in rural Cumberland County, what must go on in Newark or Jersey City?”
A new election was held September 27, 2011. The Zirkles won by a wide margin. Cynthia Zirkle, upon winning, noted her campaign had distributed a large number of absentee ballots because, in her words, “We don’t trust the system.”
She added a pointed observation about the broader implications: “Without a verified paper backup trail, there is no way of knowing whether it’s human error. Challenging these machines is virtually impossible. People should at least have assurance that their vote counts.”
No criminal charges were ever filed. No official faced prosecution. New Jersey’s paperless voting machines remained in operation across the state. Cumberland County alone was running 120 Sequoia AVC Advantage machines at the time of the incident.
The case closed with the Zirkles vindicated at the ballot box — and the larger questions about who deleted those files left permanently unanswered.
