Voting Machine Mess-up Du Jour (Displayed 07/12/04)

Volusia County, Florida. November 2000. Diebold AccuVote OS Internal Diebold memos (leaked in 2003) show that the company officials knew about the 16,022 Gore votes that were subtracted, and they still don't have an explanation for why the votes were lost. Tampering may have been the cause.
	The memos show that more than a year ago, Diebold knew of a problem with the Florida 2000 election - where a memory card inexplicably subtracted 16,022 votes from a total previously recorded for Vice President Al Gore.
	Tampering was one of four possible causes Diebold couldn't rule out at the time, the memos show. A year later, Diebold's latest official position on Florida's Volusia County vote count still does not rule out tampering. Company spokesman Bear said recently only that he was not familiar with the aberrant vote count in Volusia County. "The problem precinct had two memory cards uploaded," wrote Diebold tech Tab Iredale in one of the memos among Diebold employees. "There is always the possibility that 'the second memory card' came from an unauthorized source." Allen said, "The e-mails confirmed what we suspected - Diebold upper management knew of the problem."*

* County votes for machines. By Roger Phelps, The Porterville Recorder. June 10, 2004.