BBV-USA Today Story From the Past on Gore Negative 16,022

[RedEagle]

Argghhh! I've GOT to get on to other stuff today.
I was just sent this story and am posting it here for others who might have time to get site address to reference, which didn't come with the story, other than the generic USA Today.

Commentary (Not mine) at the top, story from 11/29/00 follows:



November 29, 2000 in USA Today by Philip Meyer. When I did a search for the article on the www.usatoday.com website I came up with this page which clearly provides the details of the article and even offers a link to a free preview of the article. However, when you click on the link, it gives you a page void of the article. What happened to it? One can only speculate. Nevertheless, I have obtained the original article and am printing it here (below the post) in its entirety as a matter of public record.]

A remarkable exchange concerning Diebold's voting machines in Volusia
County, Florida. On January 17, 2001, Lana Hines, a county elections
official sends out an inquiry as to how Al Gore ended up with a vote-count of -16,022. That's NEGATIVE 16,022-which just happens also to have been the total number of votes cast for various independent and third-party candidates who also ran. (It was the largest number of such votes cast in Volusia County's history.)

Pay close attention to the final entry, from "Tab"-that is, Talbot Iredale, Vice President of Research & Development at Global/Diebold. The most troubling of his statement is in bold below. Iredale writes:

...the error could only occur in one of four ways:

1.Corrupt memory card. This is the most likely explaination for the
problem but since I know nothing about the 'second' memory card I have
no ability to confirm the probability of this.

2.Invalid read from good memory card. This is unlikely since the
candidates<'> results for the race are not all read at the same time and
the corruption was limited to a single race.There is a possibty that
a section of the memory card was bad but since I do not know anything
more about the 'second' memory card I cannot validate this.

3.Corruption of memory, whether on the host or Accu-Vote. Again this is
unlikely due to the localization of the problem to a single race.

4.Invalid memory card (i.e. one that should not have been
uploaded). There is always the possiblity that the 'second memory card'
or 'second upload' came from an un-authorised source.


*****

Original USA Today Article

Glitch Led to 'Bush Wins' Call
By Philip Meyer

Democrats have been on the defensive ever since Fox News Channel declared George W. Bush the Florida ballot winner in the wee hours of Nov. 8 and the other networks fell into line like baby ducks, prompting Al Gore's premature concession.

From then on, nothing Democrats could do would overcome the appearance that they were trying to steal the election on technicalities. And nothing Republicans could say would overcome the suspicion that they had planned the whole thing. That a cousin of George W. Bush was working the Fox decision desk added fuel to the conspiracy theories.

But the fact is a computer glitch and a failure to get the word out in time are what caused the trouble. Deanie Lowe, Volusia County elections supervisor, spotted the problem. In her county, an Accu-Vote system uses a scanner to read a voter's mark - made with a pen, not a punch - and advances a counter in an electronic storage
device. Results are sent to county headquarters by modem.

Precinct 216 had modem trouble, so workers fed its memory card into the headquarters' central computer. "Gore just went backward," an election watcher said.

"You're tired," Lowe replied. "You must be seeing things." Then another observer chimed in: Gore's count had gone backward.

Lowe ordered all of the precincts reviewed. At 1:24 a.m., the review showed that 412 of 585 registered voters in Precinct 216 had cast ballots - but that they had given 2,813 votes to Bush! Gore had a negative vote: minus 16,022. Ralph Nader's negative vote was even greater. The problem was traced to an error in the memory card.

Bad information means bad call

Meanwhile, the decision desks of the five networks and The Associated Press, owners of Voter News Service (VNS), were looking at models that included the negative Gore count. "That contributed to a statewide number that made it look like Bush was more than 50,000 ahead of Gore, with 97% reported and about 180,000 votes still to be counted," recalls Warren Mitofsky, who headed the CNN/CBS decision desk. "You can't make up 50,000 out of 180,000. I would have made that call without hearing anybody else's call."

Mitofsky is the dean of election-night estimators. His moves are watched by the other decision desks. "Warren is just so knowledgeable, you do take that into consideration," says Paul J. Lavrakas, who has been an election consultant for VNS.

But what none of the decision-makers knew was that Bush's lead then really was closer to 30,000. The estimation model correctly was forecasting it would drop by 30,000, so the right number would have projected a tie - which in fact it did later in the morning after the Volusia error was fixed.

The real vote in Precinct 216 was 22 for Bush and 193 for Gore. Nader got one.

Not all made the call

The VNS side of this story has yet to be told. VNS' head, Murray Edelman, gave a previously scheduled talk after the election to the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research, but would not discuss the case. That's a pity, because both VNS and the AP deserve credit for never jumping on that early morning Bush bandwagon. We'd all like to know what they saw that the networks missed.

When they created VNS, the networks intended it to do everyone's calls. But in 1994, the AP and ABC jumped ship, with each doing its own projecting from the pooled data. The others followed - at the cost of disconnecting analysts from their data.

Networks do check each other. But they all feel the same pressure: If
viewers are scanning channels, who are they watching? The anchor with the winner's name or the one who admits he hasn't figured it out yet? With a system like that, we don't need a conspiracy theory.

Philip Meyer, who holds the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina, is a USA TODAY consultant and member of its board of contributors.

[papau]

1. So in 2000 BBV found 216 votes out of 412 - and no one worries?

22 plus 193 plus 1 is 216

So somehow a GOP area of the state finds a Dem sub-area vote is much less than the recorded voters - I wonder how often that happens?

:-(

And even the media reporting is only into putting an excuse for a bad projection on the record - and does not care about election theft - or at least the appearance of such.

[pretzel4gore]

2. 18181(?)

was that was number of a buncha repuke victories during midterm elections? .... the freepers call it 'coup glitches' (chuckle)
'In Bush They Trust' in the United States of SlamBamThankyouMa'America (formerly, before 'gee doubleyou' screwed her, the United States of America) :-(

[hang a left]

3. I just cannot believe they got away with this

on edit: I don't recall reading this in the chapter on the Florida election in Greg Palast's book The Best Democracy.......

[haymaker]

4. I read alot about it, and amazingly,

voting machines disappeared in Volusia only to show up later in some closet. Because of problems (yeah right) with modems, some machines had to be taken to county HQ for tabulation, which is when some disappeared for a while. It got so bad, a judge put fuckin' yellow police tape around the Volusia County Election office that night.

It was a total fuckin mess. One of many spots where the election was stolen. I think that CBS online had a good story about this and the votes appearing and disappearing with regard to Gore and the independent candidates. It was just after the election. Try there, but let me warn you, it will piss you off.

[NJCher]

5. I remember it, too

I remember it because of Volusia County, where a freeper type from another board I once frequented lives.

This is disgraceful. How can this country allow events to go forward with this obvious fraud? It just boggles my mind.


Cher

[Fridays Child]

6. Kicking...

...and printing out to take with me and read.

[sinkingfeeling]

7. Isn't there more wrong here than meets the eye?....

I was able to locate the original article in the archives, but it doesn't appear to be available for $$, so couldn't check it. But above, it first states that " the review showed that 412 of 585 registered voters in Precinct 216 had cast ballots ". Later it says, " The real vote in Precinct 216 was 22 for Bush and 193 for Gore. Nader got one." Doesn't anyone think it's odd that the 22+193+1 equals 216...the same as the precinct number? What happened to the other 196 votes that were cast at 'the review'?

[TacticalPeek]

8. As juicy as this article is re: machine 'quirks'

and highly relevant to BBV, I believe the county had the paper scan ballots for their manual recount, and yielded a net plus for Gore of just under 200 votes, IIRC. Maybe not, that time is such a swirl of memories.

So, good thing they had the paper trail (validation?), but the 'missing' machines and police tape make you wonder about even their paper backup. I may be wrong, but I seem to remember that this county was also the one that allowed repuke operatives direct access to voter records during the campaign. (?)