Volusia error

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The Volusia error is an example of the problems with electronic voting from the 2000 US Presidential election.

Late in the night on November 7, 2000 the US election had come down to a tight race over Florida and its 25 electoral votes. Both Al Gore and George W. Bush were within 25 electoral votes of the necessary count to win the presidency, so the entire race boiled down to the contest in Florida.

In Volusia County, Florida a strange error was discovered upon reviewing the electronic voting results. As the Washington Post put it:

"Something very strange happened on election night to Deborah Tannenbaum, a Democratic Party official in Volusia County. At 10 p.m., she called the county elections department and learned that Al Gore was leading George W. Bush 83,000 votes to 62,000. But when she checked the county's Web site for an update half an hour later, she found a startling development: Gore's count had dropped by 16,000 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had picked up 10,000--all because of a single precinct with only 600 voters." Washington Post Sunday, November 12, 2000

The error cropped up in Volusia's 216th precinct of only 585 registered voters. A Diebold Election Systems voting machine showed that 412 of those registered voters had voted (a perfectly reasonable number). The problem was that the machine also claimed those 412 voters had somehow given Bush 2,813 votes and more impressively had given Gore a negative vote count of -16,022 votes (Green Party candidate Ralph Nader was shown to have an even larger negative vote, though he was not considered a likely winner of the whole Florida election).

Most major television news networks had originally called Florida for Gore (before the polls closed in Florida), but retracted the call around 10 p.m. EST. Fox News was the first to lead the charge the other way, acting on data that included this impossible Volusia County 216th precinct data, completely altering the close race with a sudden 18,000+ vote margin opening up for Bush over Gore. Fox News called Florida for Bush at 2:16 a.m. on November 8, with other networks following in the next few minutes. These calls were then retracted and Florida declared too close to call once the Volusia error was reported to the networks.

Eventually the error was fixed, and the correct vote count discovered. Of the registered voters in the precinct, 22 voted for Bush, 193 for Gore, and 1 for Nader.

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