Volusia error

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The Volusia error is an example of the problems with electronic voting from the 2000 US Presidential election.

Late in the night on November 7, 2000 the US election had come down to a tight race over Florida and its 25 electoral votes. Both Al Gore and George W. Bush were within 25 electoral votes of the necessary count to win the presidency, so the entire race boiled down to the contest in Florida.

In Volusia County, Florida a strange error was discovered upon reviewing the electronic voting results. As the Washington Post put it:

"Something very strange happened on election night to Deborah Tannenbaum, a Democratic Party official in Volusia County. At 10 p.m., she called the county elections department and learned that Al Gore was leading George W. Bush 83,000 votes to 62,000. But when she checked the county's Web site for an update half an hour later, she found a startling development: Gore's count had dropped by 16,000 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had picked up 10,000--all because of a single precinct with only 600 voters." Washington Post Sunday, November 12, 2000

The Volusia neagive 16,022 votes has been verified as factually accurate by the engineers and programmers who worked for Global Election Systems, now Diebold Election Systems Inc. Several internal company memos were leaked in which the engineers discuss what could have caused the negative votes in Volusia County. One of the memos is from Volusia election worker Lana Hires who demands the voting machine company explains the error: "I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here "looking dumb"."

Lana Hires memo: [1]

TAB IREDALE MEMO: [2]

Ken Clark memo [3]

Guy Lancaster memo [4]

John Mclaurin memo [5]

(These memos were the subject of a lawsuit against Diebold, which ruled that the memos are legally in the public domain.)

The facts and story of Al Gore's minus 16,022 vote anomaly in Volusia County are the subject of the controversial 2006 HBO documentary Hacking Democracy which climaxes in the on camera hacking of the same Diebold system used in Volusia in 2000. That ground breaking hack, now known as the 'Hursti Hack' used negative votes to rig the votes on the Diebold voting system.

The error cropped up in Volusia's 216th precinct of only 585 registered voters. A Diebold Election Systems voting machine showed that 412 of those registered voters had voted (a perfectly reasonable number). The problem was that the machine also claimed those 412 voters had somehow given Bush 2,813 votes and more impressively had given Gore a negative vote count of -16,022 votes (Green Party candidate Ralph Nader was shown to have an even larger negative vote, though he was not considered a likely winner of the whole Florida election).

Most major television news networks had originally called Florida for Gore (before the polls closed in Florida), but retracted the call around 10 p.m. EST. Fox News was the first to lead the charge the other way, acting on data that included this impossible Volusia County 216th precinct data, completely altering the close race with a sudden 18,000+ vote margin opening up for Bush over Gore. Fox News called Florida for Bush at 2:16 a.m. on November 8, with other networks following in the next few minutes. These calls were then retracted and Florida declared too close to call once the Volusia error was reported to the networks.

Eventually the error was fixed, and the correct vote count discovered. Of the registered voters in the precinct, 22 voted for Bush, 193 for Gore, and 1 for Nader.

United States presidential election, 2000

General election results • State results • Florida results

Key figures

Al Gore (presidential campaign) • George W. Bush (George W. Bush campaign) • Katherine Harris • Theresa LePore • David Boies • Joseph P. Klock • Theodore Olson • James Baker

Election Day

Florida Central Voter File (scrub list) • Volusia error • Chads • Butterfly ballot

Aftermath and legal proceedings

Florida election recount • Brooks Brothers riot • Palm Beach County Canvassing Board v. Harris (Harris I) • Gore v. Harris (Harris II) Bush v. Gore

Reaction

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy • The Betrayal of America • Fahrenheit 9/11 • Supreme Injustice • Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election