OK amadeus, lawdog, partytime, ellen, and anyone else I forgot that still refuses to allow Palm Beach voters to take responsibility for their own actions:
ELECTION 2000, Day 28
Punch-card vendor
refutes Gore claims
Tests showed no tabulation
flaws;
blank prez votes result of
voter apathy
By Paul Sperry
© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com
Paul Nolte doubts claims by
Vice President Al Gore that
flaws in equipment used in
tabulating punch-card votes in
Palm Beach and Miami-Dade
counties caused several hundred
votes for Gore to go uncounted
on Election Day. Nolte should
know. He sold the counties
their tabulation systems.
In an interview with
WorldNetDaily, Nolte insists
his Election Tabulation Network
accurately counted punch-card
ballots there, including some
14,000 with blank votes for
president.
The undervotes -- about 10,750
in Miami-Dade and 3,300 in Palm
Beach -- are now at the heart
of legal battles raging in
Florida and U.S. courts over a
manual recount.
Gore has claimed the ballots
"have not yet been counted at
all, not once." And he's sure
that hand inspections of the
ballots for so-called "dimples"
will yield several hundred new
votes for him -- enough to
overcome George W. Bush's
state-certified lead of 537
votes.
Nolte, president of Little
Rock, Ark.-based Election
Resources Corp., is nonplused
by Gore's claims.
"He keeps saying that these
ballots have never been
counted, but they have been
counted -- and they've been
accurately counted," he said.
Nolte says virtually all
undervotes are not the result
of error, but of voter apathy.
"He may find it hard to believe
that someone wouldn't vote for
president, but they didn't," he
said.
"And the same situation holds
true whether this is
optical-scan paper ballots, or
whether it's punch-card ballots
-- or even if it's
direct-recording electronic
ballots," he said. "Those are
people who just don't vote for
everything."
Indeed, WorldNetDaily found
that undervote rates in several
Florida counties that use
pencil-marked paper ballots,
which are read by
optical-scanners, were as high
as or higher than rates in Palm
Beach and Miami-Dade counties,
which use the much-maligned
punch-card ballots.
Of course, as a vendor with
contracts in several states,
Nolte has a financial interest
in downplaying any flaws in his
system.
But he says tests prove his
system read ballots without a
hitch.
The diagnostic tests were
conducted by Palm Beach and
Miami-Dade elections
supervisors before and after
Election Day. Nolte says he
received no reports of errors
from those officials -- or any
officials from the 10 other
Florida counties that use his
punch-card tabulating system.
In fact, Palm Beach Supervisor
of Elections Theresa LePore, a
Democrat, was happy with the
results, according to the
chairman of the county's
canvassing board.
"Her opinion was (that) the
counting equipment was working
fine," Palm Beach Judge Charles
Burton testified Saturday in a
Tallahassee, Fla., circuit
court hearing on Gore's
petition for a hand recount.
Under Florida law, hand
recounts require evidence of
machine malfunction or voter
fraud. Voter error is not an
automatic reason to trigger the
statute.
Before and after the election,
Florida county supervisors ran
three "L&As" -- logic and
accuracy tests, he says.
"They counted a test deck of
cards, and they knew what the
results should be off that test
deck," Nolte explained. "And
they counted it for a sampling
of precincts to where they get
all the voting positions
covered, or, in some cases,
like in Sarasota County, they
count every precinct that's
involved in the election."
He added: "And they prove that
the hardware and the software
work."
The first test was conducted
within days of the election and
was made public, he says, to
make sure the system is
working. Bush and Gore campaign
officials were invited, along
with the press.
"And then, just before they
counted ballots on election
night, they repeated the test,
exactly the same test, to
verify that they got exactly
the same results and that they
were accurate," Nolte said.
"And then they cleaned out the
machine and counted the ballots
for real."
After the official tabulation,
they ran a final test of the
system to verify again that
they got exactly the results
they were looking for in their
test deck, he says.
"So they're sandwiching the
tabulation of actual ballots in
between logic and accuracy
tests that prove the hardware
and software is 100 percent
accurate," Nolte added.
But Gore's legal team argues
that the equipment may not have
picked up any light shining
through "dimpled" chad next to
Gore's name on the ballots, and
therefore may not have read
them as votes for him.
His lawyers note that Palm
Beach's canvassing board (which
is controlled by Democrats)
turned 8 percent of its
no-votes into votes for him --
without even considering
dimpled chad.
They claim it's evidence the
punch-card voting method is
less accurate in reading votes
than other newer methods, such
as the optical-scan system.
A statistician for the Gore
camp testified Saturday that
Florida counties that use the
optical-scan method reported a
lower rate of undervotes in
this White House race than
those that use the punch-card
method.
Nicolas Hengarten, a Yale
University associate professor,
said counties employing
optical-scan balloting averaged
3 undervotes in 1,000
presidential votes cast, while
counties with punch-card
balloting averaged 15
undervotes in 1,000.
Analyses by the New York Times
and CNN arrived at the exact
same rates -- 0.3 percent and
1.5 percent -- as Hengarten --
even though they all surveyed
different counties.
(The Times surveyed only 30 out
of 41 counties using
optical-scan ballots, because
11 didn't count unvoted ballots
separately, or did not provide
the Times with data. And the
paper looked at only 15 of the
25 counties using punch-card
ballots. Reason: 10 use
DataVote systems and not the
notorious Votomatic. DataVote
uses a paper punch instead of a
stylus, and supposedly doesn't
have the problem of hanging
chad, though absentee ballots
are still mailed out with a
stylus. Meanwhile, CNN surveyed
36 counties with optical-scan
ballots and 18 counties with
punch-card ballots. Hengarten,
who was forced to admit making
"mistakes" in a court
affidavit, said he managed to
collect undervote data from
only 50 counties and had to
rely on "newspapers" for the
other 17.)
But a statistician hired by the
Bush camp countered that the
undervote variance was more
likely a coincidence and had
little to do with the accuracy
of the systems.
Laurentius Marais found that at
least a dozen counties had
individual rates that
"overlapped" in range, whether
they used the punch-card system
or the optical-scan system.
Spitting out ballots
WorldNetDaily's own survey of
counties that use optical-scan
balloting found that several
had undervote rates as high or
higher than Palm Beach County
(2.2 percent), Miami-Dade
County (1.6 percent) or Broward
County (1.1 percent), which
also uses the punch-card ballot
and has already manually
recounted its ballots at Gore's
urging.
Franklin County, for
instance, had 70 undervotes
for president out of 4,644
total votes cast for
president, for an undervote
rate of 1.5 percent.
Franklin, which uses
optical-scan balloting,
went for Bush.
Baker County had 134
ballots with no-votes for
president out of 8,154
cast, which is a 1.6
percent undervote rate.
Baker, which uses the
optical-scan method, voted
2-to-1 for Bush.
Nick Frilling, an aide to
the county's elections
supervisor, does not
consider the no-votes
errors. He calls them
"protest votes."
Holmes County had an
undervote rate of 1.9
percent, with 141 voters
skipping the White House
race out of 7,395. Holmes,
using optical-scan
balloting, voted for Bush
by a more than 2-to-1
margin.
Then there's Washington
County, which also uses the
bubble-scan method. It had
292 undervotes out of
8,024. The 3.6 percent rate
is higher than even Palm
Beach's. Washington went
2-to-1 for Bush.
Gore analysts argue that
optical-scan voting systems
reduce the number of
undervotes, in part because
many are programmed to alert
voters when they skip a race.
After the voter feeds the paper
ballot into the scanner, it
will spit it back out and
either print out an explanation
or display a digital message.
The voter, in turn, has the
option of spoiling the ballot
and voting again.
But undervote rates were high
even in Florida counties with
scanning machines that kick
back undervoted ballots,
WorldNetDaily has learned.
Calhoun County has such a
computer system, yet it
registered 78 undervotes for
president out of 5,256
presidential votes cast, for a
no-vote rate of 1.6 percent --
higher than Broward's and as
high as Miami-Dade's.
"They just didn't want to vote
for president," a Calhoun
County elections office
spokeswoman told WorldNetDaily.
Apples and oranges
Broward, Palm Beach and
Miami-Dade voted heavily for
Gore and have canvassing boards
controlled by Democrats or, in
Miami-Dade's case, not by
Republicans.
But that's not the reason Gore
says he singled those counties
out for hand recounts. He says
they showed evidence of voting
"irregularities" -- such as
high rates of overvoting and
undervoting -- which he says
are tied to the punch-card
ballots. And he says he just
wants to make sure every
voter's "vote counts" there.
But WorldNetDaily found two
other counties using punch-card
ballots -- Marion and Sumter --
that reported even higher
undervote rates than Palm
Beach's 2.2 percent. Marion,
which uses the Votomatic booths
like Gore's three heavily
Democratic target counties, had
2,445 undervotes for president
out of 102,956 votes cast.
That's a 2.4 percent undervote
rate.
Sumter, with 593 undervotes out
of 22,261, had an even higher
2.7 percent rate.
Yet Gore isn't demanding manual
recounts of those counties'
ballots.
One reason may be that, unlike
Broward, Palm Beach and
Miami-Dade, both Sumter and
Marion voted for Bush over
Gore, and at least Marion's
canvassing board is controlled
by Republicans.
Some political analysts say
that allowing hand recounts in
Gore's select three counties
would produce uneven election
results.
For a true apples-to-apples
comparison, they say, ballots
in all 67 counties would have
to be recounted by hand. If
Gore gets his way, it would be
like comparing 64 apples to
three oranges.
Gore insists that he offered to
recount all counties by hand,
but that Bush declined. He
still has not explained,
however, why he needs Bush's OK
to go ahead with his proposal.
Dimples in a haystack
Meanwhile, Gore plows ahead
with the notion that uncounted
votes lurk in undervoted
sections of 14,000 ballots cast
in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade.
He says they appear as dimples,
or little marks, created by the
stylus used by voters who
mysteriously couldn't punch
through -- or even puncture --
the paper chad next to his
name. He claims they still left
an impression.
But the instructions posted in
the booths used by Palm Beach
voters do not mention dimples
in advising voters to check
their ballots for clean
punches. The closest it comes
to that term is "hole," as in:
If you see a puncture, but not
a clean punch, ask for a new
ballot.
Even witnesses called by Gore's
lawyers admit that the concept
of dimples as votes is
something new.
"Dimples are a newer phenomenon
in American electoral history,"
testified Kimball Brace,
president of Election Data
Services.
And Burton, the head of the
Palm Beach canvassing board,
swore that the nearly 4,000
ballots with no votes cast for
president looked to him like
nothing more than no-votes.
Nolte points out that, contrary
to the impression given by Gore
and the media, none of those
ballots were thrown out because
the section for president was
left blank. Down-ballot votes
were still registered by
tabulating machines.
"The ballot is examined
contest-by-contest," he said.
"So when those 14,000 people
undervoted for president,
anyone else they voted for was
tabulated, and their votes
counted." |
