From Redrock Eater:
[Peter Orvetti <http://www.orvetti.com/>, whose site was easily the fastest and most reliable last night, says that a locked ballot box was found in a Democratic region of Florida. Missing ballot boxes are a Florida tradition, and I enclose a piece on the 1988 Senate election that Peter Neumann wrote for SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes. Reformatted to 70 columns.]
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Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 10:20:27 PST From: "Peter G. Neumann" <neumann at csl.sri.com>
[...]
========================================================================
FROM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, January 1989, Peter G. Neumann:
The latest item on the integrity of computers in elections relates to the November 1988 Senate race in Florida. *The New York Times* (Saturday, 12 Nov 88, page 9) had an article by Andrew Rosenthal on suspicions of fraud arising from the results. At the end of the Election Day ballot counting, the Democrat Buddy Mackay was ahead. After the absentee ballots were counted, the Republican Connie Mack was declared the winner by 30,000 votes out of 4 million. However, in four counties (for which B.R.C. provided the computing services), the number of votes counted for Senator was 200,000 votes less than the votes for President while in other counties and in previous elections the two vote totals have generally been close to each other. Remembering that punched card are intrinsically a flaky medium and easy to alter surreptitiously, and that the computer systems in question reportedly permit their operators to turn off the audit trails and to change arbitrary memory locations on the fly, it seems natural to wonder whether anything strange went on. Subsequent to the Times article, a recount was requested, but a selective recount of a few precincts apparently turned up nothing unusual. However, doubts linger about the essential subvertibility of the process -- particularly in the case of punched cards.
In Texas, a law suit has been filed on behalf of the voters of the state challenging the entire election and requesting not a recount but an entirely new election. The grounds are that the State did not follow its own procedures for certifying the election equipment.
From Declan McCullagh's Politech List:
>From: Adam Powell <apowell at freedomforum.org>
>To: "'declan at well.com'" <declan at well.com>
>Subject: but will online voting elect Bush?
>Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 09:36:02 -0500
>X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21)
>
>Declan,
>
>It's reported that the 5,000 Florida votes that have not been counted at all
>are overseas absentee -- mostly military. That can only be good news for
>Bush, given how heavily the military went for the GOP. But now the Internet
>angle...
>
>There's an interesting Internet voting angle here: There is a little-known
>federal experiment in Internet voting taking place this week involving
>troops overseas who vote in -- yes -- Florida. According to Polli Brunelli
>from FVAP, the agency administering the test [http://www.fvap.ncr.gov/],
>speaking at our eVoting workshop here last month [see
>http://www.netvoting.org/], the number of troops would be very small -- no
>more than a few thousand -- who otherwise might not have been able to get
>their ballots back to Florida by the deadline. But, but, but... Could this
>be the first year the Internet decides a presidential contest????
>
>Cheers
>Adam
>Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 09:06:45 -0800 (PST)
>From: "Bradley K. Sherman" <bks at emf.net>
>To: declan at well.com
>Subject: Waitress! Civics Lessons all 'round
>
>
>It's Wed Nov 8 09:01:59 PST 2000. Do you know where your
>Elector is?
>
> >From <URL:http://www.nara.gov/fedreg/elctcoll/faq.html>