Reply #25: ah, found some more detail on V county #'s, etc. [View All]

[Snazzy]

(at the risk of replying to myself--

http://tinyurl.com/s62d


Thursday, November 09, 2000

Volusia County the focus of nation's questions

by MATT GRIMISON and ANDREW LYONS, Staff Writers

DELAND - A nation anxious to learn the identity of its next president focused Wednesday on Volusia County as elections officials grappled with an embarrassing computer glitch and a partisan battle over a state-ordered recount.

The outcome could not have been more critical.

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"We were the last county in the state to report," Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe said of Tuesday night's questionable vote tally. Voters "are hoping there's a change here. . . . All eyes are on us."

By the end of a tedious recount Wednesday, tallies that did not include 32 overseas absentee votes upheld Gore's apparent victory in Volusia County. The tally showed a total of 97,063 votes to Bush's 82,214 votes. Flagler County's recount of 10 out of 27 precincts was complete earlier in the day with Bush grabbing 12,613 votes and Gore earning 13,897. Bush picked up five votes in the recount and Gore six.

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The glitch, which occurred when a faulty computer memory card reported votes that were tens of thousands off, touched off a wild day in the Elections Office as the three-member Volusia County Canvassing Board conducted a recount.

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... "Who will be president of the United States comes down to . . . Volusia County."

While Lowe had the problem solved by early Wednesday morning, television's "Big Three" commercial networks - NBC, ABC and CBS - were calling local officials and area media agencies asking the same question: What went wrong in Volusia?

But Lowe said only one thing went wrong: The memory disc failed. The malfunction threw returns into disarray around midnight Tuesday, most notably showing a negative tally of 16,022 (minus-16,022) for Gore in Precinct 216 and giving Bush hundreds more votes than the 22 he earned there. That precinct is located at Earl Brown Park in DeLand.

The same problem gave 9,888 votes to Socialist Workers Party presidential candidate James Harris when he actually had only eight. In addition, the glitch awarded Bush 8,642 votes that he had not earned and stole 2,415 votes from Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader.

A string of surreal events framed the glitch, with a high-ranking elections worker detained and searched by deputies early Wednesday morning after an erroneous tip reported that she left the Elections Office with two bags of ballots. Later, a precinct clerk also made a dramatic entrance Wednesday afternoon in the middle of the recount when he delivered a bag of ballots that was inadvertently left in his car.

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Things had gone smoothly Tuesday until precinct 216's tally revealed some peculiar numbers.

First, the tally showed 2,813 voters cast ballots in the precinct where only 585 people are registered. Then it had Bush with more than 500 votes and a topsy-turvy result of minus 16,022 votes for Gore.

Those results tainted the county's running tallies, shaving Gore's comfortable lead.

Poll workers brought the ballots from Precinct 216 to the Elections Office and physically ran the ballots through another tallying computer to reveal the true numbers: 193 for Gore and 22 for Bush, with 219 ballots cast.

Lowe said the running tallies were subsequently adjusted.

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Edit: found a way to make some snips and a link. Orig. had whole thing.