You may recall the strange discrepancies in the vote totals from Williamson County as reported by the Secretary of State and the Williamson County Clerk. Via Eye on Williamson, we now have an explanation for what happened.

After finalizing all the results from election day, the Williamson County Elections Department found an error in the total votes calculated by computer software.

According to Williamson County Elections Administrator Debra Stacy, the error did not affect the results of the Nov. 7 election.

"Voter sign-in sheets at each voting precinct showed that approximately 84,500 people voted in Williamson County out of 208,521 registered voters for a 40 percent voter turn-out," she said in a written statement. "However, the elections computer software program that tallies all votes, both scanned ballots and electronic votes, recorded more than 91,000 votes."

Stacy said the problem occurred within the Election Systems & Software (ES&S) software program.

"While tallying the final results, the software took the number of electronic votes and multiplied that number by three," she said. "Although there were more votes recorded, it was at the same percentage for both Republican and Democratic candidates. This means that the software problem did not affect the outcome of any election."

Amanda Brown, a spokeswoman for ES&S, said the company is working closely with the county elections division to understand the origin of the problem.

"It hasn't been determined it was a software problem," she said. "It could've been, but it also could've been machine or human error as well. We're working diligently to address what exactly caused the problem."