Election 2002 "voting problems"

Interesting article.

http://www.jrn.columbia.edu/studentwork/election/2002/problems/vns-finch.asp

VNS is its own very strange, very odd ball of wax.

Would it surprise you that the computer contract for VNS was held by Battelle Memorial Institute - based in Ohio - a DEFENSE CONTRACTOR? Would it surprise you further that Battelle does biochemical warfare research, including anthrax?

Aside from that, here is a bit on the 2000 election, with extra special participation by Bush's cousin.....

One Call Too Many?

NEW YORK November 14, 2000 18:04:07 http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/11/14/politics/main249357.shtml
(AP) Fox is looking into whether Ellis violated rules set by Voter News Service restricting when information from voter exit polls can be released. (CBS) A Fox News consultant involved in making judgments about presidential "calls" on Election Night admits he was in touch with George W. Bush and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush by telephone several times during the evening, but denies having broken any rules.

Fox is considering disciplinary action against the consultant, John Ellis, who is a cousin to Bush and a former Boston Globe columnist who stopped writing about the campaign for the paper, citing family "loyalty" to Bush. On Election Night, Ellis headed a four-person team that analyzed Voter News Service (VNS) exit poll data for the network and made judgments about which candidate would win each state when all the votes had been counted. The decision to broadcast those projections was made by a Fox executive.

At 2:16 a.m. on Wednesday morning, Fox became the first network to call Florida for Bush. Minutes later, CBS, ABC, NBC, and CNN made the same call. VNS is an exit polling service created by the networks and the Associated Press to provide data to subscriber news organizations on Election Day. Before votes are counted and made public, journalists use VNS to see how the vote is going among people who participated in the polling. The data, which updates continuously on Election Night, can also be used to divine trends, such as how Americans of a given gender, age bracket, income or religion are voting.

The contract between VNS and its subscribers prohibits news organizations from broadcasting/publishing or sharing a state's election results with non-subscribers, until a "large majority" of polls have closed in that state. The New Yorker magazine reported that Ellis "relay early vote counts as they showed up on his screens." Ellis admits to having been in touch with George W. and Jeb Bush several times during the evening, but denies having violated VNS rules and Fox policy. <MORE>