http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=452972&host=3&dir=70
14 October 2003 The Independent (UK) Andrew Gumbel
<snip>
Something very odd happened in the mid-term elections in Georgia last
November. On the eve of the vote, opinion polls showed Roy Barnes, the
incumbent Democratic governor, leading by between nine and 11 points.
In a somewhat closer, keenly watched Senate race, polls indicated that
Max Cleland, the popular Democrat up for re-election, was ahead by two
to five points against his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss.
Those figures were more or less what political experts would have
expected in state with a long tradition of electing Democrats to
statewide office. But then the results came in, and all of Georgia
appeared to have been turned upside down. Barnes lost the governorship
to the Republican, Sonny Perdue, 46 per cent to 51 per cent, a swing
of as much as 16 percentage points from the last opinion polls.
Cleland lost to Chambliss 46 per cent to 53, a last-minute swing of 9
to 12 points.
Red-faced opinion pollsters suddenly had a lot of explaining to do and
launched internal investigations. Political analysts credited the
upset - part of a pattern of Republican successes around the country -
to a huge campaigning push by President Bush in the final days of the
race. They also said that Roy Barnes had lost because of a surge of
"angry white men" punishing him for eradicating all but a vestige of
the old confederate symbol from the state flag.
But something about these explanations did not make sense, and they
have made even less sense over time. When the Georgia secretary of
state's office published its demographic breakdown of the election
earlier this year, it turned out there was no surge of angry white
men; in fact, the only subgroup showing even a modest increase in
turnout was black women.
There were also big, puzzling swings in partisan loyalties in
different parts of the state. In 58 counties, the vote was broadly in
line with the primary election. In 27 counties in Republican-dominated
north Georgia, however, Max Cleland unaccountably scored 14 percentage
points higher than he had in the primaries. And in 74 counties in the
Democrat south, Saxby Chambliss garnered a whopping 22 points more for
the Republicans than the party as a whole had won less than three
months earlier.
Now, weird things like this do occasionally occur in elections, and
the figures, on their own, are not proof of anything except
statistical anomalies worthy of further study. But in Georgia there
was an extra reason to be suspicious. Last November, the state became
the first in the country to conduct an election entirely with
touchscreen voting machines, after lavishing $54m (£33m) on a new
system that promised to deliver the securest, most up-to-date, most
voter-friendly election in the history of the republic. The machines,
however, turned out to be anything but reliable. With academic studies
showing the Georgia touchscreens to be poorly programmed, full of
security holes and prone to tampering, and with thousands of similar
machines from different companies being introduced at high speed
across the country, computer voting may, in fact, be US democracy's
own 21st-century nightmare.
<snip>
Alarmed and suspicious, a group of Georgia citizens began to look into
last November's election to see whether there was any chance the
results might have been deliberately or accidentally manipulated.
Their research proved unexpectedly, and disturbingly, fruitful.
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