What the news networks and the Al Gore camp do not realize at this point in the evening is that over 24,000 of votes that make up this significant lead are attributable to two Diebold Election Systems computer errors. First there are the 16,022 votes stolen from Gore in Volusia county by the "faulty memory card". Meanwhile over in Brevard County another error - also involving Global Elections System (the predecessor of Diebold) equipment is responsible for a further 4000 votes being lopped off the Gore total. And it is also worth noting that nobody knows whether the Brevard and Volusia county errors were the only ones in play at this time. These errors were both big ones. They were noticed and corrected on the night. How many smaller vote subtractions could have taken place on the night? Theoretically hundreds. As Dana Milbank's Washington Post report shows it was only because someone noticed the error in Volusia that it was corrected and remarkably the software itself contains no automatic system for rejecting negative vote totals being reported by precincts, events which by definition can only be nefarious and wrong. At 2am another VNS error came into play. VNS's estimates of the outstanding votes underestimated those that remained to be counted by half, around 180,000. The two errors combined led news executives at CBS to conclude that Bush's final winning margin in Florida would be around 30,000 votes. At this stage Bush had a lead of around 50,000 votes and late reporting precincts were expected to pare this back as many of them were in Democrat leaning counties... |
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Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which since 2005 existed for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. Our goal: to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Because the problems with electronic (computerized) voting systems include a lack of (more...)