The Thirty-Year Glitch

[shiina]

I was reading the new release of Freeman's paper, and was reminded of the following passage from the book "Votescam"

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On election evening we were at Ken's house to watch the returns on television. The numbers were flashed on the screen about every 20 minutes and our percentage of the vote remained consistent at 16 percent. Channels 4 and 7 were giving the election full coverage but Channel 10, for the first time in its history, ran a movie instead of voting results. Sometime after 9 p.m. our vote percentage jumped to 31 percent.<\b>

"Hey, we just doubled our vote!" Ken was excited.

"If it holds we'll have enough strength to run again in 72," Jim said.

Suddenly the news director came on the air and announced that the election "computer has broken down." Instead of giving official returns from the courthouse, the station would instead broadcast returns based on its "projections."<\b>

When the next "projection" was flashed 20 minutes later, Ken's vote had fallen back to 16 percent.<\b> No other vote had fluctuated, only ours.

We didn't know it at the time, but across the country in the 1970s and 1980s, that sequence of events was a phenomenon that became rather common. 1) A candidate is ahead, the good guy, the one who wanted the city audit, the one who'll make a difference. 2) Television announcement: "The computer has broken down at the courthouse and official votes will no longer be forthcoming." 3) When the computer comes back, your guy is behind again, and there he or she remains.<\b>

(from Votescam: The Stealing Of America http://www.votescam.com/)

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An article from the Washington Post about the glitch of 2004, cited in Freeman's paper.

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New Woes Surface in Use of Estimates
By Richard Morin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 4, 2004; Page A29

An Election Day filled with unexpected twists ended with a familiar question: What went wrong with the network exit polls?

In two previous national elections, the exit polls had behaved badly. Premature calls by the networks in Florida led to a congressional investigation in 2000. Two years later, a computer meltdown resulted in no release of data on Election Day.<\b>

On Tuesday, new problems surfaced: a 2 1/2-hour data blackout<\b> and samples that at one point or another included too many women, too few Westerners, not enough Republicans and a lead for Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry in the national survey that persisted until late in the evening.

...

To compound the problem further, a server at Edison/Mitofsky malfunctioned shortly before 11 p.m. The glitch prevented access to any exit poll results until technicians got a backup system operational at 1:33 a.m. yesterday.<\b>

The crash occurred barely minutes before the consortium was to update its exit polling with the results of later interviewing that found Bush with a one-point lead. Instead, journalists were left relying on preliminary exit poll results released at 8:15 p.m., which still showed Kerry ahead by three percentage points.

(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23580-2004Nov3.html)

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You'd think they would have fixed that glitch by now...

Yeah, yeah, I know...it's not the same glitch. Yeah, whatever.

Remember the old "how many does it take to screw in a lightbulb" joke? How about "How many glitches does it take to screw the country?"

[Lauri]

1. Interesting Article from 11/4/04 - had not heard any about this

"To compound the problem further, a server at Edison/Mitofsky malfunctioned shortly before 11 p.m. The glitch prevented access to any exit poll results until technicians got a backup system operational at 1:33 a.m. yesterday.

The crash occurred barely minutes before the consortium was to update its exit polling with the results of later interviewing that found Bush with a one-point lead. Instead, journalists were left relying on preliminary exit poll results released at 8:15 p.m., which still showed Kerry ahead by three percentage points."


They knew the public would accept a "computer glitch". They have in the past. "Funny" how it was after they got the backup system operational that the exit poll numbers made the statistically impossible switch from Kerry to Bush in key states. It was between 1 AM & 2 AM that the numbers flipped.