"The first signs that the Diebold-made system in Volusia County was malfunctioning came early on election night, when the central ballot-counting computer showed a Socialist Party candidate receiving more than 9,000 votes

and Vice President Al Gore getting minus 19,000.

Another 4,000 votes poured into the plus column for Bush that didn’t belong there.

Taken together, the massive swing seemed to indicate that Bush, not Gore, had won Florida and thus the White House.

Election officials restarted the machine, and expressed confidence in the eventual results, which showed Gore beating Bush by 97,063 votes to 82,214.

After the recount, Gore picked up 250 votes, while Bush picked up 154. But the erroneous numbers had already been sent to the media."

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"What’s particularly troubling, Harris says, is that the errors were caught only because an alert poll monitor noticed Gore’s vote count going down through the evening, which of course is impossible.

Diebold blamed the bizarre swing on a “faulty memory chip,” which Harris claims is simply not credible.

The whole episode, she contends, could easily have been consciously programmed by someone with a partisan agenda.

Such claims might seem far-fetched, were it not for the fact that a cadre of computer scientists showed a year ago that the software running Diebold’s new machines can be hacked with relative ease.

The hackers posted some 13,000 pages of internal documents on various web sites – documents that were pounced on by Harris and others. A desperate Diebold went to court to stop this “wholesale reproduction” of company material.

By November of last year, the Associated Press reported that Diebold had sent cease-and-desist letters to programmers and students at two dozen universities, including the University of California at Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The letters were ignored by at least one group of students at Swarthmore College, who vowed an “electronic civil disobedience ”campaign."

"The first signs that the Diebold-made system in Volusia County was malfunctioning came early on election night, when the central ballot-counting computer showed a Socialist Party candidate receiving more than 9,000 votes

and Vice President Al Gore getting minus 19,000.

Another 4,000 votes poured into the plus column for Bush that didn’t belong there.

Taken together, the massive swing seemed to indicate that Bush, not Gore, had won Florida and thus the White House.

Election officials restarted the machine, and expressed confidence in the eventual results, which showed Gore beating Bush by 97,063 votes to 82,214.

After the recount, Gore picked up 250 votes, while Bush picked up 154. But the erroneous numbers had already been sent to the media.