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Diebold
Memos Disclose Florida 2000 E-Voting Fraud
The
Diebold Memos' Smoking Gun Volusia Co.
Memos
Disclose Election 2000 Vote Fraud
by
Alastair Thompson
Dissident Voice
October
23, 2003
First
Published in Scoop
"DELAND, Fla., Nov. 11 - Something
very strange happened on election night to Deborah Tannenbaum, a Democratic
Party official in Volusia County. At 10 p.m., she called the county elections
department and learned that Al Gore was leading George W. Bush 83,000 votes to
62,000. But when she checked the county's Web site for an update half an hour
later, she found a startling development: Gore's count had dropped by 16,000
votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had picked up 10,000--all because
of a single precinct with only 600 voters."
-- Washington Post Sunday ,
November 12, 2000 ; Page A22
Yes.
Something very strange happened in Volusia County on election night November
2000, the night that first Gore won Florida, then Bush, and then as everybody
can so well remember there was a tie. Something strange indeed. But what
exactly? In the above report (click for full version),
written days after the election, hotshot Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank
goes on to attribute the strange 16,022 negative vote tally from Volusia's
precinct 216 to an apparently innocent cause. "[F]aulty 'memory cards' in
the machines caused the 16,000-vote disappearance on election night. The glitch
was soon fixed," he wrote. But thanks to recent investigations into Black
Box Voting by Washington State writer Bev Harris, we now know this explanation
is not correct. In fact it is not even in the ballpark. According to recently
discovered internal Diebold Election Systems memos, Global Election Systems'
(which was later purchased by Diebold) own technical staff were also stumped by
the events in Volusia County. In Chapter 11 of her new book, Black Box
Voting In the 21st Century, released early today in PDF format at Blackboxvoting.com and here at Scoop, Ms
Harris observes:
"If
you strip away the partisan rancor over the 2000 election, you are left with
the undeniable fact that a presidential candidate conceded the election to his
opponent based on [results from] a second card that mysteriously appears,
subtracts 16,022 votes, then just as mysteriously disappears."
Working
in parallel with Ms Harris, Scoop has also been inquiring into the events on
election night in Volusia county. Much of the material that follows is similar
to that which appears in Chapter 11 of her book. The starting point in this
shocking discovery about election 2000 came in a series of internal Diebold ES
technical support memos. The following is an abbreviated version of the
exchange concerning the peculiar events in Volusia county. For the purposes of
research the exchange is included in full as an Appendix
to this report (APPENDIX TWO). The discussion took
place in early 2001 as an audit was underway in Volusia county into the events.
(NOTE:
The names below each extract link to the full text of the emails in the
appendices below)
I
need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been
waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al
Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so
that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here
"looking dumb". Lana Hires - Volusia County Florida -
January 17, 2001 8:07 AM My understanding is that the card was not corrupt
after (or before) upload. They fixed the problem by clearing the precinct and
re-uploading the same card. So neither of these explainations washes. That's
not to say I have any idea what actually happened, its just not either of
those... The problem is its going to be very hard to collect enough data to
really know what happened. The card isn't corrupt so we can't post-mortem it
(its not mort). Ken Clark - Diebold ES R&D Manager -
January 18, 2001 1:41 PM - the negative numbers on media display occurred when
Lana attempted to reupload a card or duplicate card. Sophia and Tab may be able
to shed some light here, keeping in mind that the boogie man may me reading our
mail. Do we know how this could occur? John McLaurin -
Diebold ES - 18 Jan 2001 15:44:50 The problem precinct had two memcory
cards uploaded. The second one is the one I believe caused the problem. They
were uploaded on the same port approx. 1 hour apart. As far as I know there
should only have been one memory card uploaded. I asked you to check this out
when the problem first occured but have not heard back as to whether this is
true. When the precinct was cleared and re-uploaded (only one memory card as
far as I know) everything was fine. ... Given that we transfer data in ascii
form not binary and given the way the data was 'invalid' the error could not
have occured during transmission. Therefore the error could only occur in one
of four ways: ... [4.] There is always the possiblity that the 'second memory
card' or 'second upload' came from an un-authorized source. Tab
Iredale - Diebold ES - 18 Jan 2001 13:31 If this problem is to be properly
answered we need to determine where the 'second' memory card is or whether it
even exists. Heh. Second shooter theory. All we need now is a grassy knoll. Ken Clark - Diebold ES R&D Manager - 18 Jan 2001 16:42:50
I will be visiting with Lana on Monday and will ascertain the particulars
related to the second memory card. One concern I've had all along is
"if" we are getting the full story from Lana. I'll be back in touch
and thanks for all of y'alls (that's southern for all of you) help. John McLaurin - Diebold ES - Thu, 18 Jan 2001 16:56:06
Unfortunately,
whether or not John McLaurin got to the bottom of the mystery of Volusia County
is something the memos cannot tell us. Searches of the Diebold memos database
find a single follow-up memo from McLaurin about the
Checksum Errors experienced in Volusia, but nothing on the mysterious 16,022
negative vote count. Which leaves us where exactly? What we know from the memos
can be summarized as follows:
*
Two memory cards were uploaded from Volusia Couny's precinct 216, the second
one was loaded sometime close to 2am in the morning. It automatically replaced
the first card's results and reduced Gore's total by 16,022 votes and added
votes to Bush plus a variety of minor candidates;
*
Both memory cards loaded into the system clean and without errors, indicating
(contrary to the official line) that they were not faulty;
*
After the error was noticed the original card was reloaded and the mistake was
rectified; - The error was introduced in such a way that the total number of
votes remained unchanged (again something that could not happen by chance.);
*
According to the technical boffins, the chance of the memory card being
corrupted and still passing the checksum error test are less than 60,000 to
1;
*
The technical managers at Diebold Election Systems considered it a reasonable
possibility that the second card was part of deliberate conspiracy to rig the
election results. In her book Bev Harris explains the issue of whether the card
was a chance fault or a deliberate example of tampering"
"A
memory card is like floppy disk. If you have worked with computers for any
length of time you will know that a disk can go bad. When it does, which of the
following is most likely? In an Excel spreadsheet that you saved on a "bad
disk," might it read a column of numbers correct the first time:
"1005, 2109, 3000, 450..." but the second time, replace the numbers
like this: "1005, 2109, -16022, 450..." Or is it more likely that the
"bad disk" will...fail to read the file at all, crash your computer,
give you an error message, or make weird humming and whirring noises." source:
page
239, Chapter 11, "Black Box Voting in the 21st Century"
However
officially, as we learned earlier, the explanation given publicly -- and accepted
without demur by the media -- for the strange events in Volusia county is that
there was simply a "faulty memory card". The "faulty memory
card" explanation is also included in a CBS News
Network investigation into the Election 2000 debacle. And it is here that
we find a considerable amount of information about just how significant the
Volusia County events were on election night. The first thing we learn from
CBS's investigation into the events of election night is that according to the
Voter News Service (VNS) exit polls for Florida Al Gore should have won
comfortably.
7:00
PM: The vast majority of Florida polls close. CBS
News decides not to project a winner in the Florida Presidential race at poll
closing, even though the best estimate, based upon exit-poll interviews from
the 45 survey precincts, shows Gore leading Bush by 6.6 points. The Decision
Desk decides to wait for some actual votes from sample precincts to confirm the
exit-poll results. 7:40 PM: The VNS computation shows a "call" status
in the Florida Presidential race. This status means that statistically Gore is
leading, but the Decision Team needs to check more data. Source
VNS
eventually officially called the Florida race to Gore at 7.52pm,
notwithstanding comments early in the vote count from George Bush that he was
confident he would win both Florida and Pennsylvania (comments which were never
fully explained). With the benefit of hindsight we think we now know that the
VNS data was wrong. That is certainly what the CBS inquiry found. In the report
attached below there is a range of explanations for this given [click here to view], none of them adequately explain
the magnitude of the error however. Most of the news networks followed the VNS
call giving Florida to Gore. And by 8.02pm all networks had announced Gore as
the winner in Florida. And it wasn't till 9pm that some doubts
about this call started to emerge. First up a significant error -
attributed to a typing mistake - was found in the VNS data at 9.07pm. This led
to closer examination of the rest of the data and the incoming returns. By
around 10pm the Florida calls to Gore were all officially withdrawn. This is
recorded in the CBS report as follows:
9:54
PM: The CBS News Decision Desk recommends that the
call in Florida for Gore be withdrawn. CBS is in a local cutaway at 9:54 PM
(the seven minutes at the end of the hour when local stations broadcast their
own election results), and so CBS does not withdraw the call until 10:00 PM.
10:16 PM: VNS retracts its Florida call for Gore.
The CBS timeline then jumps forward four hours to 2am
EST. By now an apparently substantial lead of 29,000 votes has opened up in
favour of George Bush.
2:09
AM: VNS adds Volusia County's erroneous numbers to its tabulated vote. With 171
out of 172 precincts in the county reporting, Gore's vote drops by more than 10,000
while Bush's rises by almost the same amount. This 20,000-vote change in one
county increases Bush's VNS statewide lead to more than 51,000 votes. - Source
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. At 2.16am Fox and NBC called the race to Bush, unaware that the
Volusia error had now been discovered. Over at Associated Press - the news
service that Network News controllers do not read - the margin to Bush had by now
fallen to 30,000 after correcting the Volusia error. At 2.17am and 2.20am the
remaining two major networks CBS and ABC called the race to Bush. Their
decision continued to be bolstered by the VNS data stream - which even at
2.47am - was still recording a margin to Bush of close to 50,000 votes.
Remarkably it was not till 2.51am that VNS fixed the
Volusia error in its data. Meanwhile with all the networks showing the race
for the White House won by Bush, the pressure is mounting on Gore to concede.
In the book, "Too Close to Call" by journalist Jeffrey Toobin, the
author gives a behind-the-scenes account of how Gore reacted when the
television networks concluded that Bush had taken Florida. "Al Gore happened
to be in the staff room on the seventh floor when the votes spiked up in Bush's
favor. Dressed casually, the vice president was watching television while lying
on the floor, with his chin propped up in his hands. As a result of the Volusia
votes, Fox News called Florida-and the presidency-for Bush at 2:16 a.m. CBS and
NBC followed suit a minute later and ABC came in at 2:20 a.m.," Toobin
wrote in his book.
"Following
the news reports, Gore was silent and absorbed the news. A moment later he told
members of his campaign that he was ready to concede the election to Bush,
which he did several minutes later over the telephone. "Unwilling to take
the television networks reports at face value, one of Gore's campaign staffers
did a little investigating and discovered that the networks erred in stating
that 50,000 votes from Volusia county were cast for Bush. Turns out that Gore
was ahead by 13,000 votes in Volusia and trailing Bush by 6,000 votes overall.
Something was wrong in Volusia it would be revealed later. One of Gore's campaign
advisers then checked Florida's law on recounts. The nearly dead heat between
Bush and Gore in Florida and the fact that Gore was ahead in Volusia County
meant a mandatory recount. It was time to rescind Gore's concession to Bush and
scrutinize the ballots. Gore was traveling in a motorcade en route to deliver a
concession speech to his supporters. His staff stopped him. At this point, the
margin between Bush and Gore was down to 2,000 votes. A recount was all but
certain."
Gore
called Bush and Gore's staff surrounded the vice president to listen in on what
would become a historic conversation at 2:30 a.m. "Circumstances have
changed dramatically since I first called you," Gore said to Bush, Toobin
wrote. "The state of Florida is too close to call." "Are you
saying what I think you're saying?" Bush asked according to Toobin.
"Let me make sure that I understand. You're calling back to retract that
concession?" Gore sensed an annoyance in Bush's tone and shot back
"you don't have to be snippy about it." Toobin says Bush then told
Gore that his "little brother", Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, had assured
him that he won the state of Florida and for that matter the presidency of the
United States. "Let me explain something," Toobin quoted Gore as
saying in his response to Bush. "Your little brother is not the ultimate
authority on this." "You do what you have to do," Bush said and
hung up the phone on Gore. When Gore turned around to face his staff they
exploded in cheers. It is not till 3.10am that the CBS news controllers notice
the huge difference between their numbers and those of AP which by now show the
margin to Bush at under 10,000. We also know, thanks
to the CBS inquiry report, that by around 3.40am the Gore camp had decided
not to concede. Gore Campaign Chairman William Daley rang CBS News President
Andrew Heyward in the control room and asked him whether CBS would be reversing
its call soon. CBS's Andrew Heyward waited another 15-20 minutes after the
phone call before ordering CBS to officially withdraw the call to Bush. And by
4.05am all the other networks had also withdrawn the call. By 4.10am the
reported Bush lead in the race had dropped to 1800 votes, and thereabouts it remained
until the first recount - albeit the Florida Secretary of State's office
website reported the race to Gore on the day after the vote. And it is there
that the narrative in this tale ends and the analysis starts. In its internal
conclusions about these events the CBS inquiry team found the two Diebold
County level errors, Volusia and Brevard, were
conclusive in their networks decision to call the race to Bush.
"The
mistakes, both of which originated with the counties, were critical, since
there were only about 3 percent of the state's precincts outstanding at this
time. They incorrectly increased Bush's lead in the tabulated vote from about
27,000 to more than 51,000. Had it not been for these errors, the CBS News call
for Bush at 2:17:52 AM would not have been made." - source
You
do not get much clearer than that. The record already shows that events of
election night 2000 turned on the errors in the Volusia and Brevard vote
counts. Both of which occurred on Global Election Systems (now Diebold)
equipment. Of course we now know Al Gore did not concede. But had he done so
would that have altered what followed? Would there have been the hanging-chad
phenomena, the lawsuits over recounts and the recriminations? Most of what is
contained in the preceding analysis is well trodden territory. Everybody knows
that the TV networks screwed up big time on election night, and the issue of
bias at those networks has also been well traversed. What has not been
discussed, or even conceived of till now, is that the events that occurred
between around midnight and 4am might have been the result not of mistakes but
of organised voting fraud. Yet that is precisely what Talbot Iredale and Ken
Clark's memos confirm is a distinct possibility, in fact, reading between the
lines they suggest it is the most likely possibility. Consider this: How
plausible is it that an error such as this - of such magnitude, with no
apparent physical explanation, and in one of the few counties still receiving
incoming results that late in the night - was really the simple result of a
"faulty memory card"? We also now know, again thanks to the work of
Black Box Voting investigators like Washington State's Bev Harris and California's
Jim March, that the Diebold vote tallying programme used in several Florida
counties, GEMS, is easily hackable, both by outsiders and by insiders.
[See...
Bev Harris's "Inside A
U.S. Election Vote Counting Program" for
details and Jim March's "DIEBOLD'S VOTE-TALLY
SOFTWARE- Security Review Instructions"
for a kit to demonstrate the hack on your own computer.]
We
do not know what would have happened had a full state-wide recount been
undertaken as the efforts to have one were blocked in the courts. Would they
have discovered other counties where unusual events like those discovered in
Brevard and Volusia counties? Is it possible that the original VNS exit polling
data was closer to being correct? Is it possible that less egregious vote
stealing took place in counties all over Florida? Add into the mix the blatant
roll scrubbing in Florida discovered by Greg Palast and exposed in his
best-selling book The Best Democracy
Money Can Buy and you have a recipe of reasons to reopen a full scale
inquiries into the Florida debacle. And perhaps more importantly. With
paper-less touchscreen voting systems in place in many Florida counties come
November 2004, should such events occur again, there will be no record with
which to conduct a recount. And the other big mystery of course is this. If
someone did try to rig the election returns in Florida in 2000, who was it?
Alastair
Thompson is an award winning New Zealand investigative
journalist and the Co-Editor of Scoop.co.nz,
where this article first appeared. This report draws heavily from the work of
Bev Harris in her new book Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st
Century. California based investigative reporter Jason Leopold also
contributed to this report. For more information on Black Box Voting,
see http://www.blackboxvoting.com/
and it's activist arm http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
*
For more background and live news links on this subject see also Scoop's
Special Feature, “A
Very American Coup”
APPENDICES
APPENDIX
ONE
EXTRACT FROM CBS
REPORT INTO ELECTION 2000 - Pages 16 to 25
CBS NEWS COVERAGE OF
ELECTION NIGHT 2000 Investigation, Analysis, Recommendations
Prepared By: Linda
Mason, CBS News Kathleen Frankovic, CBS News Kathleen Hall Jamieson, The
Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania January 2001 CBS
News 2001 Full report here: http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/c2k/pdf/REPFINAL.pdf
*****
EXTRACT FROM REPORT BEGINS *****
[Page
16]
THE
FLORIDA CALLS
As
CBS News began its Election Night coverage at 7:00 PM on Tuesday, November 7,
Dan Rather pointed out that since Florida wasn't called when a majority of the
state's polls closed at 7:00 PM, this would be a tight race. Rather told the
audience, "We're waiting on a possible decision in Florida, but you've got
time to put on another cup of coffee, and pour it, because in Florida it's
generally considered to be so close that it may be a long while before anybody
is able to call it." Given what eventually happened, that may have been
the wisest comment of the night. But less than 20 minutes later, CBS and other
networks called Florida for Gore, and the evening's roller-coaster ride began.
Let us review what happened.
The Call for Gore: How It Happened
7:00
PM: The vast majority of Florida polls close. CBS
News decides not to project a winner in the Florida Presidential race at poll
closing, even though the best estimate, based upon exit-poll interviews from
the 45 survey precincts, shows Gore leading Bush by 6.6 points. The Decision
Desk decides to wait for some actual votes from sample precincts to confirm the
exit-poll results.
7:40
PM: The VNS computation shows a "call"
status in the Florida Presidential race. This status means that statistically
Gore is leading, but the Decision Team needs to check more data.
7:45
PM: The CBS News Decision Team begins an intensive
review of the state exit polls and the trickle of actual votes in the sample
precincts. The CBS News analysts look at the calculation that compares the
exit-poll results with the actual votes in the same precincts. The CBS News
Decision Desk is aware that two years ago, in the VNS survey of the Jeb Bush
race for governor, exit polls underestimated the Bush lead. This year, the exit
poll is overstating George W. Bush's vote in the first precincts to report. The
analysts had noticed a similar overstatement earlier in the evening in the
Kentucky exit poll.
Now
the analysts examine the actual vote of the 4 percent of precincts statewide that
have reported at this time. Although the tabulated vote shows Bush with a
6-point lead, they see this as an early aberration, the result of absentee
ballots that had been entered into the system early in the evening. The
absentee vote was expected to favor Bush, so the analysts do not consider this
one-time occurrence to be representative of the vote to come. Later, this
judgment proves to be incorrect. The CBS News Decision Team also notes that the
standard margin of error on the estimates is small enough to make the
probability of a Gore win fall within CBS News guidelines for a call.
7:48
PM: NBC projects Gore the winner in Florida.
[Page
17]
7:50:11
PM: CBS projects Gore the winner in Florida.
7:52:32
PM: VNS calls Florida for Gore.
[Page
18]
Analysis of the Call for Gore
The
outcome of the Florida election was a virtual tie. In its ongoing review, VNS
suggests that the wrong call for Vice President Gore in Florida could have
resulted from a combination of many factors. If any one of these had turned out
differently, it is very likely that the race would not have been called. VNS
has identified four possible sources of error:
*
Estimate of the Absentee Vote. Absentee voters tend to have different
demographic profiles and often vote differently than Election Day voters,
making it difficult to account accurately and completely for absentee votes in
the models. As the size of the absentee vote increases, so does the potential
for error in the estimates. The model had estimated the size of the absentee
vote at 7.2 percent. In fact, it turned out to be 12 percent of the total
Florida vote. The model also assumed that the absentees would be 22.4 points
more Republican than Election Day voters. They turned out to be 23.7 points
more Republican.
*
Sampling Error. The results of the exit poll normally vary from the
actual tabulated vote by a small amount ("sampling error"). A large
difference between the exit-poll results and the tabulated vote for that
precinct would suggest the possibility of interviewing problems. The amount of
this error in Florida fell within the normal range for an exit poll, although
it was at the high end. However, the exit-poll sample itself, even after the actual
vote totals from those precincts were examined, was also more pro-Gore than the
state as a whole.
*
Past-Race Comparisons. One of the most important ways that VNS
models form estimates of the vote is to compare current exit-poll data and
tabulated votes with data from past elections. Throughout the night, the 1998
Florida gubernatorial race was used as the past-race comparison. However, had
the model used a different past race (either the 1996 Presidential election or
the 1998 Senate race), it would have produced a more accurate estimate.
*
Distortions Caused by the Time of Reporting. At 7:50 PM,
there were only six precincts with both exit-poll data and actual reported
vote. The estimate of the average error within those precincts suggested that
the survey was actually underestimating the Gore lead by 1.7 percentage points,
when in reality it turned out later that the exit poll was overestimating the
Gore lead by 2.8 points. Miami and Tampa, the areas that had the biggest
overstatement of the Gore lead in the exit polls, had reported no actual votes
by 7:50 PM, so there was nothing to contradict the distortion in the exit
polls.
[Page
19]
Withdrawing
the Call for Gore: How It Happened
8:02
PM: By this time, VNS and all its members have
projected Gore the winner in Florida.
8:10
PM: The CBS News analysts have been rechecking the
Florida race and feel even more confident about the call for Gore, based on the
data available at 8:10.
9:00
PM: A member of the CBS News Decision Team notices
a change in one of the Florida computations. One of the estimates, the one
based solely on tabulated county votes, is now showing a Bush lead. Alerted,
the team begins to review Florida and discovers problems with the data.
9:07
PM: VNS reports county-tabulated vote data from
one county, Duval, that puts Gore in the lead in the tabulated-vote estimate.
It turns out that this was an error, apparently an entry mistake by a keypunch
operator at VNS headquarters. Although this error occurs long after the Gore
call has been made, it seems to support the accuracy of a Gore win until the
data-entry mistake is discovered. (The wrong data showed Gore receiving 98
percent of the tabulated vote. In the end, he received only 41 percent of the
vote in Duval.)
9:38
PM: VNS discovers the error and deletes the Duval
County vote from the system, sending a correction to all members. Gore's total
in Florida is reduced by 40,000 votes.
9:54
PM: The CBS News Decision Desk recommends that the
call in Florida for Gore be withdrawn. CBS is in a local cutaway at 9:54 PM (the
seven minutes at the end of the hour when local stations broadcast their own
election results), and so CBS does not withdraw the call until 10:00 PM.
10:16
PM: VNS retracts its Florida call for Gore.
[Page
20]
The
Call for Bush and Its Withdrawal: How It Happened
2:00
AM: The CBS News Decision Team tracks the Bush
margin in the Florida popular vote. He leads by 29,000 votes in VNS, with some
strongly Democratic counties yet to complete their counts. But the AP numbers
are telling a different story. The AP independently collects election returns
from each county. Since 1:12 AM, AP tabulations show the Bush lead dropping
precipitously. But the people on the CBS News Decision Desk are not following
the AP reports, nor are they listening to Ed Bradley in the studio talking
about irregularities and outstanding Democratic votes in Florida.
At
1:43:43, Bradley points to the fact that a third of the vote is not yet in from
Dade and Broward Counties, which are Democratic strongholds. At 1:48:10,
Bradley says: "Bush ahead by 38,000 votes. And still out there, about 5
percent of the vote is still out, 270,000 votes. So that's a big chunk of
votes." Bradley has been getting additional information from the AP wire,
as well as from CBS News Correspondent Byron Pitts, who is reporting from
Florida that there are a number of counties still tabulating votes, many of
them predominantly Democratic.
What
has not yet been discovered is an erroneous entry from another Florida county,
Volusia. Because of a faulty computer memory card, the county has reported
votes that are off by thousands. The initial report from Precinct 216
incorrectly subtracts more than 16,000 votes from Gore's total and adds votes
to Bush's total.
2:05
AM: Bush leads by 29,386 on the VNS screens, with
96 percent of the precincts reporting. The models project a very small Bush win
for the end of the night. But at this time there is still no way to call the
race.
2:09
AM: VNS adds Volusia County's erroneous numbers to
its tabulated vote. With 171 out of 172 precincts in the county reporting,
Gore's vote drops by more than 10,000 while Bush's rises by almost the same
amount. This 20,000-vote change in one county increases Bush's VNS statewide
lead to more than 51,000 votes.
2:09:32
AM: At almost the same time, Bradley fires off
what in retrospect was a warning shot, but one that sails right by the CBS News
Decision Desk: "Among the votes that aren't counted are Volusia County.
Traditionally they're one of the last counties to come in. That's an area that
has 260,000 registered voters. Many of them are black and most of them are
Democrat."
2:10
AM: The CBS News Decision Desk begins to seriously
discuss calling Florida for Bush. According to the new VNS vote count, Bush is
ahead by 51,433 votes, with 5,575,730 votes counted in 97 percent of the
precincts statewide. The CBS News Decision Desk looks at how many votes are
outstanding in three major Democratic counties (Dade, Palm Beach and Broward).
The statistical analysis projects that Bush's margin of victory will remain
greater than 30,000 votes even when those counties are factored in.
[Page
21]
But
there is an error in the assumption: instead of the 179,713 votes the VNS model
says have yet to be counted, there are in fact about twice as many outstanding
votes, many of them absentee ballots from Palm Beach County. Bush's lead in the
VNS count includes the 20,000-vote error undercounting Gore in Volusia County
and does not include 4,000 additional votes for Gore in Brevard County. These
24,000 votes would have nearly eliminated the 30,000-vote final Bush margin the
CBS News Decision Desk has estimated. There would have been no call if these
errors had not been in the system.
2:12
AM: In the AP count, Bush's margin falls to
47,854. (But again, the Decision Desk is not checking the AP wire.) 2:16 AM:
Fox calls Florida for Bush. The immediate reaction of the CBS News analysts is
frustration because the CBS News Decision Desk is within minutes of calling the
race itself. The CBS News analysts spend the next 90 seconds confirming the
numbers. 2:16 AM: NBC calls Florida for Bush.
2:16
AM: The AP lead for Bush drops by 17,000 votes, to
30,000. This 17,000-vote drop, occurring in only four minutes, is the Volusia
County correction. But VNS does not catch the correction until later, and no
one on the CBS News Decision Desk is watching the AP wire or listening to
Bradley's reporting.
2:16:17
AM: Dan Rather talks with Bradley about
outstanding absentee votes and the potentially large number of votes still out
in Daytona (Volusia County).
2:17:52
AM: The CBS News Decision Desk calls Florida for
Bush, and Rather declares him the winner of the Presidential election.
2:20
AM: ABC calls Florida for Bush.
2:40
AM: VNS is showing Bush with a lead of 55,537,
with only 68,579 votes left to be counted. Had the CBS News Decision Desk
analysts not made the call at 2:17, they say, they would have made it at 2:40.
2:47
AM: The AP reports the Bush lead down to 13,934.
2:48 AM: VNS shows the Bush lead at 55,449.
2:51
AM: VNS corrects its Volusia error, and Bush's
lead drops to 39,606. 2:52 AM: The AP reports the Bush lead down to 11,090.
[Page
22]
2:55
AM: With a large report of votes from Palm Beach
County, VNS reports the Bush lead down to 9,163. 3:00 AM: Rather tells the
audience to stay tuned: "We haven't heard yet from either Al Gore or from
the triumphant Governor Bush. We do expect to hear from them in the forthcoming
minutes."
3:10
AM: A consultant in the CBS News studio working with
Lesley Stahl at the House and Governors' Desk informs the CBS News Decision
Desk of the huge drop in the Bush lead, and the CBS News Decision Team begins
investigating the numbers. It also begins tracking numbers on the Florida
Secretary of State's Web site and from the AP. While the three sets of numbers
are different, all of them show that the race has narrowed tremendously. At
this time, there is no report from VNS analyzing what has brought about this
dramatic change.
3:32
AM: There has been much anticipation during the
last half-hour about the expected Gore concession speech. Rather gives a
possible and uncannily prescient explanation for Gore's absence: "It
wouldn't surprise anybody, least of all your narrator, if Al Gore said, 'You
know what? I am not going to concede this thing because it's just too close. I
want somebody to get in there and recount those ballots'"
3:40
AM: Bush's lead drops to 6,060 votes. At around
this time, but he is not sure exactly when, CBS News President Andrew Heyward
receives a call in the control room from Gore Campaign Chairman William Daley.
It lasts less than a minute. Daley asks whether Heyward is aware of the
dwindling Bush lead and whether CBS News is considering pulling back its call
for Bush. Heyward is noncommittal and asks what Gore is planning to do. Daley
says, "I'll get right back to you," hangs up and does not call back.
There is more talk in the studio between Rather and the correspondents about
the peculiarities now emerging in the Florida vote count. They discuss the AP
count of the decreasing margin for Bush.
3:48
AM: Rather says, "Now the situation at the
moment is, nobody knows for a fact who has won Florida. Far be it from me to
question one of our esteemed leaders [CBS management], but somebody needs to
begin explaining why Florida has now not been pulled back to the undecided
category." He goes on to say, "A senior Gore aide is quoted by
Reuters as confirming that Gore has withdrawn [his] concession in the U.S.
President race."
3:57
AM: The Bush margin has narrowed to fewer than
2,000 votes. Before the CBS News Decision Desk can officially advise a
retraction, CBS News President Heyward, who has been watching the Bush lead
melt away and listening to Rather and Bradley discuss the Florida situation,
orders that CBS News retract the call for Bush.
4:05
AM: By this time, the other networks rescind the
Florida call for Bush.
[Page
23]
4:10
AM: Bush's lead drops to 1,831 votes, which is
roughly where it remains until the first recount.
[Page
24]
Analysis
of the Call for Bush
The
call was based entirely on the tabulated county vote. There were several data
errors that were responsible for that mistake. The most egregious of the data
errors has been well documented. Vote reports from Volusia County severely
understated Gore's actual total when a faulty computer memory card reported
votes that were off by thousands. That precinct, Number 216, subtracted
more than 16,000 votes from Gore's total and added votes to Bush's total. In
addition, an apparent reporting error in Brevard County reduced Gore's total by
an additional 4,000 votes.
The
mistakes, both of which originated with the counties, were critical, since
there were only about 3 percent of the state's precincts outstanding at this
time. They incorrectly increased Bush's lead in the tabulated vote from about
27,000 to more than 51,000. Had it not been for these errors, the CBS News call
for Bush at 2:17:52 AM would not have been made. While the errors should have
been caught by VNS and CBS News analysts through a comparison of VNS data with
data from the AP or the Florida Secretary of State, VNS computers could also
have had a more sophisticated program that would have constantly compared one
set of numbers with the others and raised a warning signal. (Unlike the
television networks, the Associated Press never called Florida for Bush, and,
as we mentioned earlier, neither did VNS.)
There
was another problem: the VNS end-of-the-night model uses a straightforward
projection of the number of precincts yet to report in each county. It assumes
that the outstanding precincts in each county will be of average size and will
vote in the same way as the precincts that have already reported from that
county. However, at 2:17 AM there were more as-yet-uncounted votes than the
model predicted. In fact, in Palm Beach County, a heavily Democratic area,
there were three times as many votes yet to be reported as the model predicted.
Some of that appears to be accounted for by the late release by county election
officials of a large absentee vote.
[Page
25]
Conclusion
As
we have seen above, the first Florida call for Gore was probably unavoidable,
given the current system of projecting winners. Early in the evening, the sample
that VNS selected to represent voters statewide overestimated Gore's lead, and
a call was made for him. As the tabulated vote started accumulating, Gore lost
his apparent lead, and a decision was made to take back the call. The ongoing
VNS reviews have determined that the exit-poll sample of precincts in this
election did not adequately represent the state. The exit-poll sample estimated
a significant Gore lead that never materialized. That fact remained unknown
until the actual vote count. The sampling data and exit polling did not take
into account the 12 percent of the Florida vote that was cast by absentee
ballot, which also affected the quality of the data. The CBS News Decision Desk
could not have known about these problems.
However,
the second Florida call, the one for Bush, could have been avoided. It was
based, as we have seen, on a combination of faulty tabulations entered into the
total Florida vote, with an especially large error from Volusia County that
exaggerated Bush's lead. Later, in the early morning hours, reports from large
precincts in Palm Beach were recorded, along with a surge of absentee ballots
from that county. When the Volusia County numbers were corrected and the new
numbers from Palm Beach taken into account, the Bush lead shrank, and a
decision was made to take back the Bush call. The call might have been avoided,
if there had been better communication between the CBS News Decision
Desk and the CBS News studio and newsgathering operations, which had been
reporting ballot irregularities and large numbers of potentially Democratic
votes still outstanding, and if the VNS vote totals had been checked
against the ones from the AP and the Florida Secretary of State's Web site. The
AP corrected the Volusia County error 35 minutes before VNS did, and one minute
before CBS News made its call.
And,
despite all the understandable focus on the Florida calls, they were not the
only mistaken calls of the night.
*****
EXTRACT FROM REPORT ENDS *****
APPENDIX TWO - THE DIEBOLD MEMOS
Archive
of Diebold Memos related to Volusia County 2000 incident NOTE: The originals of
these memos can be viewed online via a project located at: http://why-war.com/features/2003/10/diebold.html
CONTENTS
Memory card checksum errors (was: 2000 November Election) Guy
Lancaster 2
RE: Memory card checksum errors (was: 2000 November Election)
John McLaurin 2
RE: Memory card checksum errors (was: 2000 November Election)
Ken Clark 0
Re: Memory card checksum errors (was: 2000 November Election)
Guy Lancaster 0
RE: Memory card checksum errors (was: 2000 November Election)
Ian S. Piper 2
RE: Memory card checksum errors (was: 2000 November Election)
John McLaurin 2
RE: Memory card checksum errors (was: 2000 November Election)
John McLaurin 0
RE: Memory card checksum errors (was: 2000 November Election)
Ian S. Piper 0
Re: Memory card checksum errors (was: 2000 November Election)
Talbot Iredale 2
RE: Memory card checksum errors (was: 2000 November Election)
John McLaurin 1
RE: Memory card checksum errors (was: 2000 November Election)
Ken Clark 0
Re: Investigation of Volusia's Memory Cards. John McLaurin
*****
NEW MESSAGE *****
[Date
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(was: 2000 November Election)
**********
To:
Support "Support" Subject: Memory card checksum errors (was: 2000
November Election) From: Guy Lancaster Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 11:41:08 -0800
Organization: Global Election Systems Inc. References:
**********
This is an overview on what memory card checksum errors are. Exactly what causes them is a separate question. The memory card is very simply a programmable memory device with a battery backup. The Accu-Vote accesses this memory directly. If something goes wrong when the Accu-Vote is writing new data to the memory card or if the Accu-Vote crashes (as computers have been known to do) and writes to random memory locations, then the data on the memory card may be corrupted (nasty word I know but it fits). All this means is that the data is modified in an unintentional manner. This could also happen without an Accu-Vote through static discharge or some types of radiation (i.e. old airport scanners, cosmic rays???). There are several mechanisms that we could use to detect this. We use the simplest of these which is to treat the data as a series of numbers and store totals of sets of those numbers as separate data known as checksums. If the data has been modified without updating the checksums, then the checksums will fail to add up. The Accu-Vote keeps three different types of checksums for three different classes of data. These are text, counters, and precinct. The text checksums cover all the titles and names that are used mostly just for printing reports. Since the text data does not affect the other operations, we check it only occasionally and we allow most operations to continue after a warning. The counters and precinct data are considered critical and the Accu-Vote is largely inoperable when these checksums fail. We do support the option to clear the counters if only they have been affected and then counting may be restarted. However there is no way to recover from corruption of the precinct data other than to clear and re-download the memory card. All checksums are validated upon insertion of a memory card or at power on. Thus this is the most common time to detect problems. However the counter and precinct checksums are validated every time a new ballot is scanned. If an error is detected, counting is aborted. Now to Lana's questions. The above should answer everything other than why erroneous data managed to upload. I see two possible explanations. One is that the data was corrupted after the checksums were validated. In this case the errors would show the next time the checksums were checked. The other possibility is the miniscule chance that the erroneous data managed to add up to the correct checksum. The checksums are stored as totals ranging from 0 to 65535 so the chance of this happening are less than 60,000 to 1 just based on that. Other factors add to this to make it extremely unlikely. However in this case the card would not later show checksum errors. So John, can you satisfy Lana's request from this? I can't without more details. Guy John McLaurin wrote: Please see below and let me know what you think. Tab, one of these issues we discussed - it's the one were we printed the audit report showing the check sum error and the poll worker restarting the unit. Please let me know what you guys think. John -----Original Message----- From: Lana Hires Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2001 8:07 AM To: jmglobal Glanca Cc: Deanie Lowe Subject: 2000 November Election Hi Nel, Sophie & Guy (you to John), I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here "looking dumb". I would appreciate an explanation on why the memory cards start giving check sum messages. We had this happe