A Brief History of Cybercrime and Cyberwarfare - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 392

The Common Cause website ( www.commoncause.org ) contains a master list
of 70 verified voting machine problems in a number of states. Common Cause
also reports that only five states (Minnesota, New Hampshire, Ohio, Vermont, and
Wisconsin) had geared up to handle voting machine errors.
One case that deserves special scrutiny is the 2000 presidential election in Flor-
ida, which brought national attention to voting problems and is still controversial
even today. The final recount awarded the election to George Bush by only 537
votes over Al Gore. A number of the irregularities involved software and com-
puters.
Florida developed a “scrub list,” or a list of voters to be removed or disfran-
chised because they were felons or for some other reason. Later analysis found this
list to be biased against minorities because it removed about 1% of white voters
and 3% of minority voters.
Worse, of the 96,000 disfranchised voters called felons, many turned out not to
be felons at all and were incorrectly removed. Some were innocent citizens who
had names similar to or identical to felons. About 3,000 were felons whose voting
rights had been restored in other states and hence were eligible to vote in Florida.
This was a software-controlled activity and clearly deficient or incorrect in its
results. Given that many of the disfranchised voters were Democrats, this arbitrary
removal of registered voters probably changed the results of the national presiden-
tial race.
The Palm Beach County “butterfly” ballot had a physical problem that appar-
ently switched more than 3,000 votes to Buchanan from either Bush or Gore. The
Democrats were listed second in the left column, but punching the hole next to that
listing was counted as a vote for Buchanan by the software tabulation program.
This was more of a physical design error than a software error.
In Duval County, the presidential choices were spread over two pages, and the
printed instructions on the ballots told voters to “vote on both pages.” The results
were thousands of overballots in which voters accidentally voted for both candid-
ates instead of only their preferred candidate. Because of ambiguity of the bal-
lot, some voters wrote the name of their candidate on the ballot, but if they voted
twice (as instructed), their votes did not count. This was a human error due to poor
design and editing of the ballots themselves.
Several thousand absentee ballots from serving U.S. military personnel and
overseas travelers were thrown out because there were no visible postmarks. Be-
cause voters have no control over where and if postmarks are placed, this was an