'Recount' Stars Voting Machine That Doomed Gore

Written by Rogers Cadenhead

Over the holiday weekend, my wife M.C. Moewe wrote a news story for the Daytona Beach News-Journal on the Volusia County optical scan voting machine that registered 16,000 negative votes for Al Gore right as the networks were scrambling to decide who won Florida:



HBO's new docudrama Recount stars Kevin Spacey and Denis Leary, but the real scene-stealer hails from Volusia County -- a voting machine that registered 16,000 negative votes for Al Gore in the wee hours of election night 2000.

"A machine in Volusia went crazy," says Leary in the film, portraying a Gore campaign strategist. "It actually added 3,000 votes to Bush's total and subtracted thousands of votes from Gore. I mean Gore's count right now is negative 16,000 in that county."

What caused the voting machine memory card glitch is not a topic in the account that premieres tonight at 9 o'clock. In fact, it still remains unknown and begs the question: Could it happen again? ...

SNIP... As a programmer, I've never understood how Diebold's voting software accepted negative votes and lowered a candidate's total. You'd think the logical impossibility would've caused the input to be rejected before it altered the course of American history.





http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/news/3359/recount-stars-voting-machine-doomed

Diebold's Political Machine
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The first signs that the Diebold-made system in Volusia County was malfunctioning came early on election night, when the central ballot-counting computer showed a Socialist Party candidate receiving more than 9,000 votes and Vice President Al Gore getting minus 19,000. Another 4,000 votes poured into the plus column for Bush that didn't belong there. Taken together, the massive swing seemed to indicate that Bush, not Gore, had won Florida and thus the White House. Election officials restarted the machine, and expressed confidence in the eventual results, which showed Gore beating Bush by 97,063 votes to 82,214. After the recount, Gore picked up 250 votes, while Bush picked up 154. But the erroneous numbers had already been sent to the media.
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http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/03/03_200.html

pnorman