Reply #24: CLAIM: DIEBOLD 'PATCHED' GA. UPSET | Progressive Populist, October [View All]

[Stephanie]

http://www.populist.com/03.20.dispatches.html

DISPATCHES
CLAIM: DIEBOLD 'PATCHED' GA. UPSET

Opinion polls in Georgia on the eve of the 2002 general election showed Democratic incumbent Gov. Roy Barnes leading by 9-11 points and Sen. Max Cleland ahead of his Republican challenger by 2-5 points, so it was a shock on election night when the returns showed Barnes losing to Republican Sonny Perdue, 46 to 51 percent, a swing of as much as 16 points from the last opinion polls, and Cleland losing to Saxby Chambliss by 46 to 53 percent, a last-minute swing of 9-12 points. Pundits credited a surge of "angry white men" punishing Barnes for removing the Confederate symbol from the state flag, but the London Independent noted in a special investigative report on Oct. 14 that a demographic breakdown published by the Georgia Secretary of State showed no such surge of white men; the only subgroup showing a modest increase in turnout was black women.

There were also big, puzzling swings in different parts of the state, the Independent noted. In 58 counties, the vote was broadly in line with the primary election. In 27 counties in Republican-dominated north Georgia, however, Cleland unaccountably scored 14 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.

The big difference was that in November 2002 Georgia was the first state in the country to conduct an election entirely with touchscreen voting machines, after lavishing $54 million on a new system that promised to deliver the most secure, most up-to-date, most voter-friendly election in the nation's history. The machines, however, were found to be poorly programmed, full of security holes and prone to tampering. With thousands of similar machines from different companies being introduced at high speed across the country, Andrew Gumbel wrote in the Independent, "computer voting may, in fact, be US democracy's own 21st-century nightmare."

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"It is still unclear exactly how results from these missing cards were tabulated, or if they were counted at all," Gumbel wrote. "And we will probably never know, for a highly disturbing reason. The vote count was not conducted by state elections officials, but by the private company that sold Georgia the voting machines in the first place, under a strict trade-secrecy contract that made it not only difficult but actually illegal -- on pain of stiff criminal penalties -- for the state to touch the equipment or examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines worked properly. There was not even a paper trail to follow up."<more>