11/11/2002 Entry: "Chip Glitch hands victory to wrong party"
Chip Glitch hands victory to wrong party
Guess which party?by voxfux
Nov. 7, 2002, 3:08PM
Chip glitch hands victory to wrong candidate
Associated Press
ABILENE - A Scurry County election error reversed the outcomes in two commissioner races.
A defective computer chip in the county's optical scanner misread ballots Tuesday night and incorrectly tallied a landslide victory for Republicans. Democrats actually won by wide margins.
The problem was discovered when poll workers became suspicious of the margins of the vote, Scurry County Clerk Joan Bunch said.
A new computer chip was flown to Snyder from Dallas, she said. By Wednesday morning, the votes had been counted twice by hand and once again by scanner with the replacement chip.
Republican Robbie Floyd, 69, who lost to Democrat Jerry House, seemed agape even hours after learning of his defeat Wednesday.
"It was hard to believe that that type of mistake had happened," he said.
Incumbent Democrat Chloanne Lindsey said she had conceded the election to Republican Keith Hackfeld when she received a phone call at 3:45 a.m. notifying her of the discrepancy. Later Wednesday morning, he called to congratulate her.
"I felt bad for my opponent," Lindsey said. "I knew how it felt to lose."
vox
Viewer Commentary: 4 comments
Hats off to the "suspicious" poll workers--if all "suspicious" americans at all levels of responsible positions had the same integrity and courage to act, we could stop the nightmare we're racing towards.
Peace, Kathleen
Posted by Kathleen Beatty @ 11/11/2002 07:00 PM EST
Yeah I just wonder what happens in the future, when they "perfect" this chip...to not have such a big margin of difference??
Posted by r rami @ 11/11/2002 09:11 PM EST
I have done a fair bit of electronics design and computer, and associated electronics design.
It is EXTREMELY unlikely that a faulty chip could cause this result, and extremely simple to put a doctored program into an eprom (program chip) to make it do this. The huge unanswered question is why is there no open house scrutiny of the entire process, as there is with manual counting. I can only see one possible reason. The bit I don't understand is why Americans are accepting it.
Dave
Posted by David @ 11/12/2002 05:42 PM EST
Dave,
Americans are accepting it because nobody is telling them anything is wrong with these voting machines except for those intrepid websites like this one.
We must get out and tell everyone we know about how we are being conned once again.
Also, these machines have modems attached to them. They can be accessed remotely. I don't need to tell most how easy it is to manipulate code this way, especially if its proprietary software, who would know the differnce.
Posted by CS @ 12/17/2002 01:45 PM EST