Posted on 11/12/2001 7:45:09 PM PST by classygreeneyedblonde
A $5 plastic part buried inside hundreds of punch-card voting machines may have caused the loss of thousands of presidential ballots in Florida last November, a Herald analys
The parts, clear plastic ``templates'' meant to guide the voting stylus to the right position, sometimes did not line up properly with a certain brand of ballot, causing mispunches and hanging chads, according to experts and voting officials. is has found
The finding -- based on a Herald inspection of voting machines, internal election memos and interviews with experts -- shows that election equipment, not just careless voters, played a role in sabotaging Florida's vote.
One year after the election, the lingering questions about what Florida's lost ballots showed have been answered in ballot counts carried out by The Herald and other media. But little has been done to make certain there is no repeat of the chad debacle
Although punch-card voting is banned in Florida effective next year, it remains the most popular voting method nationwide. Thousands of punch-card machines -- and untold numbers of the suspect parts -- are still in use across the rest of the United States, meaning thousands of voters could be tripped up again
In Florida, election officials were warned about the template problems before last year's disputed presidential election. Nine months before Election Day, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris' office was alerted that the plastic part, when used with a certain brand of ballots, caused a rash of hanging chads in test balloting
Her office alerted local election officials but did not investigate
This is a situation where a problem was reported and theories were advanced and no one got back to what happened to resolve it,'' said Mike Lindsey, a senior analyst in Florida's election systems division.
MADE IN SAN DIEGO
The plastic templates are manufactured by a San Diego-area election supply company called Election Data Corp., now the only maker of most replacement parts for punch-card machines
In May, the company admitted it supplied flawed templates to Chicago and Cook County, Ill., where nearly 123,000 presidential ballots were thrown out last fall -- twice the error rate of 1996
Company owner Richard Stephens said he never heard complaints from Florida election administrators. He said it would be impossible to determine whether the templates used in Florida last fall were defective without inspecting them.
They've used our equipment for a number of years,'' he said of Florida's election supervisors. ``If there was a problem with it, it should have been brought to us. It never has.'' presidential undervotes last year all used the suspect combination of parts: at least some Election Data Corp. templates and punch-card ballots manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems. Undervotes are ballots without a vote readable by counting machines, usually the result of hanging chads
In Palm Beach County, where voters used Sequoia ballots, precincts that used Election Data equipment produced hanging-chad ballots at a rate almost three times greater than those that used equipment made by the original manufacturer of Votomatics, the most common type of punch-card machine.
Lee County, which had the test ballot problem before the 2000 spring primary, replaced all the Election Data templates, switched its brand of ballots, and ended up with the state's lowest rate of botched votes last November
In 1997, intermittent alignment problems in Pinellas County prompted election workers to modify all 4,000 of their Election Data templates by trimming off plastic nubs that kept some machines from voting properly
We either clipped them off with wire cutters or filed them flat,'' said Richard Walker, Pinellas election operations manager
Among the 15 Votomatic counties a year ago, Pinellas ended up with the state's fifth-lowest undervote rate.
In 1992, Indian River County shaved the bottom corners from 64 Election Data templates in order to get them to align properly in Votomatics. Still, few of the machines with ED templates were used. ``We just don't trust them enough to put out there for the general public,'' said equipment manager Joyce Guiliano, whose county is upgrading to touch-screen equipment.
There is no way to know precisely how many lost ballots were due to hidden problems inside the machines. But the results in Palm Beach County, along with signs of trouble elsewhere, suggest that thousands of votes might have been affected statewide -- enough to potentially affect the outcome of the election.
The Election Data parts gradually infiltrated voting machines in Florida and elsewhere through unwitting election supervisors looking to patch up their aging fleets of Votomatics, the original punch-card voting machines
Election Data is now the sole maker of most replacement parts for Votomatics. The original company quit making its own equipment years ago, although used and refurbished parts are still on the market
This was an accident waiting for a place to happen, and it found Florida,'' said Walt Tatol, of Ohio, who has 37 years of experience in the election business, including repairing of problems with punch-card machines in dozens of cities across the United States
The templates are marketed as interchangeable spare parts for Votomatics. But they are not identical, and experts say they do not always perform as well as the original equipment
John Ahmann, an engineer who helped design the Votomatic, said the holes in Election Data's templates were sometimes slightly out of place. He said it's possible something went wrong in the molding process, causing the templates to shrink too much as they cooled.
In some templates he has seen, Ahmann said, the top several rows of template holes ``are not . . . where they belong.
They're not doing 100 percent inspection, at least. You have to check those hole locations. It shrinks.
Ahmann said he did not inspect ED templates used in Florida in the last election, but did find bad parts littered throughout the company's inventory of replacement templates. He said he has no reason to think the Florida templates were any different
He said thousands of dimpled chads in Palm Beach County, which experienced by far the highest numbers of mispunched ballots, are a clear sign of machine defects.
Something is god-awful wrong,'' he said. ``I think you're looking at some defective templates link to the rest of the story
Sounds like more deflection to me. LOL
sab·o·tage (s b  -täzh )n.
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As you can see, the word "sabotage" indicates intentional disruption. A $5 part cannot itself sabotage anything. If it is being used to sabotage, then it also means the $5 part was intentionally placed there to cause trouble. Trouble, in this case, being defined as "taking away votes from Al Gore."
By using that word, these two reporters and the Herald have proved themselves to be pure Gore partisans. We cannot trust their findings.
Will Democrats want to bring up the Florida elections when they run? They would be cutting their own throats. After all it was the DEMOCRATS who wanted to get the military vote disqualified. They got a bunch of our military vote out of the count. Not to mention the local news calling the state early for Gore before the polls closed up north in Bush country. That alone cost Bush 10,000 votes.
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