For Immediate Release: Tuesday, October 21, 2003

Swarthmore, Pa. -- Defending the right of a fair, democratic election, Why War? and the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons (SCDC) announced today that they are rejecting Diebold Elections Systems' cease and desist orders and are initiating an electronic civil disobedience campaign that will ensure permanent public access to the controversial leaked memos.

Although the reasons for individual engagement in the civil disobedience vary, the consensus between the two groups is that the public availability of these documents must be protected at any cost.

Thus, through active electronic civil disobedience, Why War? and SCDC will bring to light the usually silent acts of suppression and censorship. The result will be a permanent and public mirror of the memos: documents whose public existence challenges the assumed presence of democracy in America.

The documents are currently available here:

http://why-war.com/memos/

More information about the campaign of electronic civil disobedience:

http://why-war.com/features/2003/10/diebold.html

Electronic Frontier Foundation press release:

http://www.eff.org/Legal/ISP_liability/20031016_eff_pr.php

Media contacts: Andrew Main, media@why-war.com, 610.690.3538, http://why-war.com/ Luke Smith, lsmith1@swarthmore.edu, 610.690.5546, http://scdc.emegaweb.net/

The Diebold Memos' Smoking Gun
Volusia County Memos Disclose Election 2000 Vote Fraud

Scoop -Friday, 24 October 2003

...According to recently discovered internal Diebold Election Systems memos, Global Election Systems' (which was later purchased by Diebold) own technical staff were also stumped by the events in Volusia County/

In Chapter 11 of her new book "Black Box Voting In the 21st Century" released early today in .PDF format at Blackboxvoting.com and here at Scoop Ms Harris observes.

"If you strip away the partisan rancor over the 2000 election, you are left with the undeniable fact that a presidential candidate conceded the election to his opponent based on [results from] a second card that mysteriously appears, subtracts 16,022 votes, then just as mysteriously disappears."

Working in parallel with Ms Harris Scoop has also been inquiring into the events on election night in Volusia county. Much of the material that follows is similar to that which appears in Chapter 11 of her book.

The starting point in this shocking discovery about election 2000 came in a series of internal Diebold ES technical support memos.

The following is an abbreviated version of the exchange concerning the peculiar events in Volusia county. For the purposes of research the exchange is included in full as an Appendix to this report (APPENDIX TWO). The discussion took place in early 2001 as an audit was underway in Volusia county into the events.

**********

(NOTE: The names below each extract link to the full text of the emails in the appendices below.)

I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. 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 – Volusia County Florida - January 17, 2001 8:07 AM

My understanding is that the card was not corrupt after (or before) upload. They fixed the problem by clearing the precinct and re-uploading the same card. So neither of these explainations washes. That's not to say I have any idea what actually happened, its just not either of those…

The problem is its going to be very hard to collect enough data to really know what happened. The card isn't corrupt so we can't post-mortem it (its not mort).

Ken Clark – Diebold ES R&D; Manager – January 18, 2001 1:41 PM

- the negative numbers on media display occurred when Lana attempted to reupload a card or duplicate card. Sophia and Tab may be able to shed some light here, keeping in mind that the boogie man may me reading our mail. Do we know how this could occur?

John McLaurin - Diebold ES - 18 Jan 2001 15:44:50

The problem precinct had two memcory cards uploaded. The second one is the one I believe caused the problem. They were uploaded on the same port approx. 1 hour apart. As far as I know there should only have been one memory card uploaded. I asked you to check this out when the problem first occured but have not heard back as to whether this is true.

When the precinct was cleared and re-uploaded (only one memory card as far as I know) everything was fine. …

Given that we transfer data in ascii form not binary and given the way the data was 'invalid' the error could not have occured during transmission. Therefore the error could only occur in one of four ways: …

[4.] There is always the possiblity that the 'second memory card' or 'second upload' came from an un-authorised source.

Tab Iredale - Diebold ES - 18 Jan 2001 13:31

If this problem is to be properly answered we need to determine where the 'second' memory card is or whether it even exists. Heh. Second shooter theory. All we need now is a grassy knoll.

Ken Clark – Diebold ES R&D; Manager – 18 Jan 2001 16:42:50

I will be visiting with Lana on Monday and will ascertain the particulars related to the second memory card. One concern I’ve had all along is “if” we are getting the full story from Lana.

I’ll be back in touch and thanks for all of y’alls (that’s southern for all of you) help.

John McLaurin – Diebold ES - Thu, 18 Jan 2001 16:56:06

**********

Unfortunately whether or not John McLaurin got to the bottom of the mystery of Volusia County is something the memos cannot tell us.

Searches of the Diebold memos database find a single followup memo from McLaurin about the Checksum Errors experienced in Volusia, but nothing on the mysterious 16,022 negative vote count.

Which leaves us where exactly?

What we know from the memos can be summarised as follows:

- Two memory cards were uploaded from Volusia Couny's precinct 216, the second one was loaded sometime close to 2am in the morning. It automatically replaced the first card's results and reduced Gore's total by 16,022 votes and added several thousand votes to Bush plus a variety of minor candidates;

- Both memory cards loaded into the system clean and without errors, indicating (contrary to the official line) that they were not faulty;

- After the error was noticed the original card was reloaded and the mistake was rectified;

- The error was introduced in such a way that the total number of votes remained unchanged (again something that could not happen by chance.);

- According to the technical boffins, the chance of the memory card being corrupted and still passing the checksum error test are less than 60,000 to 1;

- The technical managers at Diebold Election Systems considered it a reasonable possibility that the second card was part of deliberate conspiracy to rig the election results...

More at Scoop

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