Blogger Brad Friedman, who maintains a blog chronicling election issues, said the incident should to the 285 jurisdictions around the country using the Sequoia/Dominion system today.

While the hand count settled Wellington council elections, "it hasn't settled all question about what went wrong, and whether voters in the states which currently use the faulty Dominion/Sequoia system --- many of them swing states --- should rely on the results reported by it," he wrote.

The incident in Palm Beach County highlights the importance of post-election audits, said Dan McCrea, president of Florida Voters Foundation, an election watchdog group.

"The most effective way to mitigate such machine errors is to perform statistically significant post-election audits that take place before elections are certified," McCrea said.

If the Wellington results had been certified, there would have been no recourse under Florida law to change the results later, he said. "Everyone might have stood in a circle and agreed it was incorrect. But legally there would not have been a way to stand down the results," McCrea said.