Quote:Just ask Katherine Harris. 

 

I was able to see the problems with the 2000 election unfold first hand. I was an assistant analyst with the City of Jacksonville's IT department supporting the Election's Office applications. My former supervisor was lead analyst on the same applications before accepting a position with the Elections Office as the Supervisor of Elections top assistant. He knew there were serious problems with the voting systems, specifically with the punch cards and card readers used to tally votes.

 

Because of my disability and lack of accessible polling places and voting machines I was allowed to vote by absentee ballot. The ballots were the same pnch cards used at all polling places in Duval County, and the same IBM punch cards some of us older folks recall from the early days of computing. The directions "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate" were part of our lexicon. Any card that was not perfectly flat and with holes incompletely punched might get rejected, but more often just read incorrectly by card readers. The absentee ballots were stapled to a thin piece of styrofoam and mailed with a partially unfolded paper clip, with which you would use to punch the hole corresponding to the vote you wanted to cast.

 

There were no directions to make sure the holes were completely punched through, not instructions to make sure there were none of the infamous "hanging chads", which were tiny bits of the punched out card that hung on the back of the hole and could cause the card reader to not detect a punched hole.

 

My former supervisor, John Stafford, and I, as well as any analyst in IT knew that hanging chads were a big problem. In the early 80s we started batch processing jobs with decks of these cards. If a hole wasn't punched through cleanly it would be kicked out and the jobs would abort. My department head met with Stafford and other Elections Office officials more than once and told them of this problem on more than one occasions, but they basically blew it off, except for Stafford. There was no budget for a new system, they would tell us. The problems weren't bad enough to affect election results, they said. Well, we all know how that turned out.

 

Within a month of the 2000 election, they were accepting bids for a new system, with money being no object.

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