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There was another problem: the VNS end-of-the-night model uses a straightforward projection of the number of precincts yet to report in each county. It assumes that the outstanding precincts in each county will be of average size and will vote in the same way as the precincts that have already reported from that county. However, at 2:17 AM there were more as-yet-uncounted votes than the model predicted. In fact, in Palm Beach County, a heavily Democratic area, there were three times as many votes yet to be reported as the model predicted. Some of that appears to be accounted for by the late release by county election officials of a large absentee vote.

Conclusion

As we have seen above, the first Florida call for Gore was probably unavoidable, given the current system of projecting winners. Early in the evening, the sample that VNS selected to represent voters statewide overestimated Gore’s lead, and a call was made for him. As the tabulated vote started accumulating, Gore lost his apparent lead, and a decision was made to take back the call. The ongoing VNS reviews have determined that the exit-poll sample of precincts in this election did not adequately represent the state. The exit-poll sample estimated a significant Gore lead that never materialized. That fact remained unknown until the actual vote count. The sampling data and exit polling did not take into account the 12 percent of the Florida vote that was cast by absentee ballot, which also affected the quality of the data. The CBS News Decision Desk could not have known about these problems.

However, the second Florida call, the one for Bush, could have been avoided. It was based, as we have seen, on a combination of faulty tabulations entered into the total Florida vote, with an especially large error from Volusia County that exaggerated Bush’s lead. Later, in the early morning hours, reports from large precincts in Palm Beach were recorded, along with a surge of absentee ballots from that county. When the Volusia County numbers were corrected and the new numbers from Palm Beach taken into account, the Bush lead shrank, and a decision was made to take back the Bush call. The call might have been avoided, if there had been better communication between the CBS News Decision Desk and the CBS News studio and newsgathering operations, which had been reporting ballot irregularities and large numbers of potentially Democratic votes still outstanding, and if the VNS vote totals had been checked against the ones from the AP and the Florida Secretary of State’s Web site. The AP corrected the Volusia County error 35 minutes before VNS did, and one minute before CBS News made its call.

And, despite all the understandable focus on the Florida calls, they were not the only mistaken calls of the night.

38 & 39

STOLEN 2004 ELECTION

Fixing the Vote in Ohio

Ohio, as everyone knows, was the state that put George W. Bush over the top in the 2004 election. A comfortable 118,000-plus vote official margin in Ohio gave him a victory over John Kerry and a second term as president. There were plenty of rumors that Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell had connived with the Bush people to fix the vote, but Kerry’s people were unwilling to pursue this too far.

The story of what went on behind the scenes started to surface in a lawsuit brought by a group of citizens against Ohio officials in the summer of 2006. A well-known voting rights attorney named Cliff Arnebeck set out to charge Blackwell and his cronies with “election fraud, vote dilution, vote suppression, recount fraud and other violations.”

The first document you’re going to read here is a deposition taken of Stephen Spoonamore, an expert in computer systems who knew plenty about how electronic voting machines can be manipulated. The company he refers to, Diebold, bought the GES outfit that was involved in the Florida debacle in 2000. And the fellow he mentions at the end, Mike Connell, was Karl Rove’s IT guy. Connell was involved in developing important parts of the