Volusia Error - The Error

The Error

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 Dana Milbank of 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."

The error cropped up in Volusia's 216th precinct of only 585 registered voters. A Global Election Systems (acquired by Diebold Election Systems now Premier Election Solutions) voting machine showed that 412 of those registered voters had voted. The problem was that the machine also claimed those 412 voters had somehow given Bush 2,813 votes and in addition 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).