2004 U.s. Presidential Election Controversy, Voting Machines

""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 from a second card that mysteriously appears, subtracts 16,022 votes, then just as mysteriously disappears."

"A memory card is like a 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."

("Lana" is Lana Hires, the Volusia election employee described by Blackboxvoting as "particularly unhappy about seeing the Black Box Voting investigators in the office" in Nov 2004, described by BBV as having initially rejected their request to visit the warehouse containing election voting data, and "ordered them out")

"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. ... A moment later Gore 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 ... Gore was traveling in a motorcade en route to deliver a concession speech to his supporters. His staff stopped him."

To understand how George W. Bush will win the next presidential election, it helps to understand how he won the last one. While all public attention rested on hanging chads, butterfly ballots and a skewed recount in the wake of the 2000 Presidential election, the root of the problem has been overlooked. As investigative reporter Greg Palast uncovered, the state of Florida purged over 90,000 people from their list of eligible voters under the guise that they were felons. In fact, almost none of the disenfranchised voters were felons...but almost all were blacks or democrats.

Palast's investigation revealed that at the heart of this ethnic cleansing of voter lists was the creation of a new centralized database for the state of Florida. In 1999, the state fired the company they were paying to compile their "scrub" lists and gave the job to Database Technologies (DBT, now ChoicePoint). DBT, a private firm known to have strong Republican ties was paid $2.3 million to do the same job that had previously been done for $5,700.

The first list of felons from DBT included 8,000 names of felons from Texas supplied by George Bush's state officials. The state government said they were all felons, and thus barred from voting under federal law. Local officials complained about the list and DBT issued a new one, this time naming 58,000 felons. Palast discovered that the one county that went through the process of checking the new list name by name found it was 95% wrong ... Florida voters whose names were similar to out-of-state felons were barred from voting.

DBT didn't get names, birthdays or social security numbers right, but they were matched for race, so a felon named Joe Green only knocked off a black Joe Green, but not a white person with the same name. There was no need to guess about the race of the disenfranchised: a voter's race is listed next to his or her name in many Southern states including Florida because racial ID is required by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

DBT's fee of $2.3 million was supposed to include verification that the individuals on their list were actually felons, but Palast's investigation showed that DBT could not provide any evidence that they made a single phone call to verify the identity of the names scrubbed prior to the 2000 Presidential Election.

Unfortunately, nothing is preventing this purge from taking place again on a national scale ... Martin Luther King III and Greg Palast recently co-authored a piece on the dangers of such databases , recalling the Florida debacle. Their conclusion: "Jim Crow has moved into cyberspace -- harder to detect, craftier in operation, shifting shape into the electronic guardian of a new electoral segregation."

"...Experts said the company designed the machines and software so that vote totals could easily be altered without leaving a trace. Losing candidates in one race charged that when the computer acted up on election night, a CES employee inserted control cards into the machine. The plaintiffs sued to retrieve the source code, and the court, for once, consented. When computer experts examined the software, they determined that CES had changed the computer's instructions for tallying votes on election night. But because the program lacked adequate auditing mechanisms to track the nature of those changes, no one could determine if the company had rigged the election."

"...There were also eyewitness reports that on election night Townsend had halted vote counting for a period of time and allowed employees of the voting machine company, Sequoia Voting Systems, to access the computer containing the counting software. Townsend refused to hand over the audit logs and memory cartridges, saying they were irrelevant to a recount. This was strange because Townsend had been telling e-voting critics for the past year that voters shouldn't worry about the security of touch-screen machines because they stored three redundant versions of votes which could always be examined in a recount."