This is the thing that sticks as a problem here, of course.

“In Seminole County, Supervisor of Elections Sandy Goard said a problem had been identified in one precinct in which a computer memory card may have failed before all the ballots were counted. She said they are taking extra care in recounting the votes from that precinct.”

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2000/11/9/221910.shtml

Looks like this “negative vote” thing wasn’t entered into the final tallies.

So, I think what this internal discussion shows is that these computerized voting machines are scary (what if they couldn’t go back and hand count, especially) and that the company running things is cavalier (suggesting a half-assed fix “That would have at least prevented the embarrassment of negative votes, which is really what this is all about.”). But it doesn’t look like there’s evidence ultimately of vote fixing. Evidence that these companies are scary? Yes.

site:www.sunrise.it “checksum errors”

and

site:www.sunrise.it ~vote

Google turned out to have

1) archived versions of a couple of the posts in the thread (not all of them, strangely),

2) a thread listing which has the titles of all of the above posts,

3) a description page of of the email lists. It says “The lists are closed to Diebold Election Systems staff. Do not CC customers when posting to the lists, or forward messages from the lists to customers without permission.”

The error rate and the “second card” issues are scary.

Check out the following archived news article:

Memory Card Blamed In Seminole County
Every Ballot Being Recounted By Hand
http://www.ibsys.com/sh/election2000/florida/stories/election200-florida-20001109-112839.html

Debra A. Scott, Staff Writer
November 9, 2000, 7:22 p.m. EST

ALTAMONTE SPRINGS, Fla. — Minor mathematical errors have caused the canvassing board of Seminole County to recount by hand every one of 137,350 ballots cast on Tuesday.

Seminole County election personnel spent all night Wednesday recounting ballots.

Mathematical mistakes were found in 52 of the county’s 133 precincts.

At first, the county decided to recount only the ballots with discrepancies, but representatives of the Republican and Democratic party objected.

In one precinct, there were 1,350 available voters and 986 votes were cast. However an election worker wrote that more than 3,000 ballots were used.

“It was a long day and at the end of the day it was just a matter of not properly filling out the bottom of the ballot accounting form,” Seminole County election supervisor Sandy Gordon said.

Another problem popped up Thursday that could affect the vote tally.

Gordon said that there may be a vote difference in one precinct because of a faulty computer memory card that corrupted before they were able to feed all the ballots through the system.

One worker said that the discrepancy could amount to a 30 vote difference.

One set of books is for the local poll-workers/election-judges at each precinct to spot-check and to investigate if fraud is suspected. The other set of books is for uploading to the central county-wide (or state-wide) tabulation. The two sets of books can be made to diverge 1) via full-fledged cracking (i.e., breaking and entering a computer) by a nefarious technocrat or 2) via manipulating by the corporation who manufactured the electronic voting machine and thus wrote its software in ways to be conveniently tamperable. Cooking the second set of books can occur from hundreds or thousands of miles away if the electronic voting machines are connected to the Internet (e.g., Ethernet to broadband) or to the publicly-switched telephone network (PSTN) (e.g., a modem). The vast majority of electronic voting machines are connected via modem to the PSTN or via Ethernet to the Internet, effectively nullifying any physical security put in place by the election judges in that precinct or in that county. Thus, cooking of the second set of books can occur without any physical access to the electronic voting machines. Indeed, unless a poll-worker/election-judge notices some LEDs blinking on the external communications lines (indicating that communications are occurring between the electronic voting machine and the world outside the precinct), the second set of books can be cooked without any election official knowing and without any voter knowing.

Specifically the general technique of cooking the second set of books in the electronic voting machine is to subtract off x votes in the second set of books from the person whom the fascists want to lose and add those x votes in the second set of books to the person whom the fascists want to win. Using this technique, the total number of votes cast remains the same, thus passing one category of fraud-detection check. The first set of books are left alone so that if suspicions are raised, everything looks fine. ELECTION JUDGE: “I wonder if something funny is going on. This is a traditionally heavily Democratic precinct. Oh, the vote is 81% Democratic and 18% Republican and 1% other, which is about what it was last election. Okay, nothing wrong here.” The problem is 1) that that election judge checked the first set of untampered books and 2) that the second set of cooked books is what is officially reported *automatically* *without* *human* *observation* via modem or via Internet to the county. In our example here, what really was officially reported in the second cooked set of books was: 39% Democratic, 60% Republican, and 1% other. These fraudulant vote tabulations for that precinct are what are recorded officially by the Secretary of State and officially presented for history to judge; the original votes in the first set of books are erased shortly after the election, never to be witnessed again.

This example tampering of only one precinct discussed in this posting was enough to throw this example election to the person who (according the first reality-based set of books) received less votes. If one precinct is not enough in a close election, then repeat as many times as is necessary on other electronic voting machines in other precincts to achieve the intended election outcome.

There are other ways of manipulating the vote, such as the ways described in the Grand Theft America video at http://www.bushflash.com/gta.html

I tried the link and it doesn’t work anymore (surprise surprise).