At 1:43:43, Bradley points to the fact that a third of the vote is not yet in from Dade and Broward Counties, which are Democratic strongholds. At 1:48:10, Bradley says: "Bush ahead by 38,000 votes. And still out there, about 5 percent of the vote is still out, 270,000 votes. So that's a big chunk of votes." Bradley has been getting additional information from the AP wire, as well as from CBS News Correspondent Byron Pitts, who is reporting from Florida that there are a number of counties still tabulating votes, many of them predominantly Democratic.

What has not yet been discovered is an erroneous entry from another Florida county, Volusia. Because of a faulty computer memory card, the county has reported votes that are off by thousands. The initial report from Precinct 216 incorrectly subtracts more than 16,000 votes from Gore's total and adds votes to Bush's total.

2:05 AM: Bush leads by 29,386 on the VNS screens, with 96 percent of the precincts reporting. The models project a very small Bush win for the end of the night. But at this time there is still no way to call the race.

2:09 AM: VNS adds Volusia County's erroneous numbers to its tabulated vote. With 171 out of 172 precincts in the county reporting, Gore's vote drops by more than 10,000 while Bush's rises by almost the same amount. This 20,000-vote change in one county increases Bush's VNS statewide lead to more than 51,000 votes.

2:09:32 AM: At almost the same time, Bradley fires off what in retrospect was a warning shot, but one that sails right by the CBS News Decision Desk: "Among the votes that aren't counted are Volusia County. Traditionally they're one of the last counties to come in. That's an area that has 260,000 registered voters. Many of them are black and most of them are Democrat."

2:10 AM: The CBS News Decision Desk begins to seriously discuss calling Florida for Bush. According to the new VNS vote count, Bush is ahead by 51,433 votes, with 5,575,730 votes counted in 97 percent of the precincts statewide. The CBS News Decision Desk looks at how many votes are outstanding in three major Democratic counties (Dade, Palm Beach and Broward). The statistical analysis projects that Bush's margin of victory will remain greater than 30,000 votes even when those counties are factored in.

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But there is an error in the assumption: instead of the 179,713 votes the VNS model says have yet to be counted, there are in fact about twice as many outstanding votes, many of them absentee ballots from Palm Beach County. Bush's lead in the VNS count includes the 20,000-vote error undercounting Gore in Volusia County and does not include 4,000 additional votes for Gore in Brevard County. These 24,000 votes would have nearly eliminated the 30,000-vote final Bush margin the CBS News Decision Desk has estimated. There would have been no call if these errors had not been in the system.

2:12 AM: In the AP count, Bush's margin falls to 47,854. (But again, the Decision Desk is not checking the AP wire.)

2:16 AM: Fox calls Florida for Bush. The immediate reaction of the CBS News analysts is frustration because the CBS News Decision Desk is within minutes of calling the race itself. The CBS News analysts spend the next 90 seconds confirming the numbers.

2:16 AM: NBC calls Florida for Bush.

2:16 AM: The AP lead for Bush drops by 17,000 votes, to 30,000.

This 17,000-vote drop, occurring in only four minutes, is the Volusia County correction.

But VNS does not catch the correction until later, and no one on the CBS News Decision Desk is watching the AP wire or listening to Bradley's reporting.

2:16:17 AM: Dan Rather talks with Bradley about outstanding absentee votes and the potentially large number of votes still out in Daytona (Volusia County).

2:17:52 AM: The CBS News Decision Desk calls Florida for Bush, and Rather declares him the winner of the Presidential election.

2:20 AM: ABC calls Florida for Bush.

2:40 AM: VNS is showing Bush with a lead of 55,537, with only 68,579 votes left to be counted. Had the CBS News Decision Desk analysts not made the call at 2:17, they say, they would have made it at 2:40.

2:47 AM: The AP reports the Bush lead down to 13,934.

2:48 AM: VNS shows the Bush lead at 55,449.

2:51 AM: VNS corrects its Volusia error, and Bush's lead drops to 39,606.

2:52 AM: The AP reports the Bush lead down to 11,090.

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22 2:55 AM: With a large report of votes from Palm Beach County, VNS reports the Bush lead down to 9,163.

3:00 AM: Rather tells the audience to stay tuned: "We haven't heard yet from either Al Gore or from the triumphant Governor Bush. We do expect to hear from them in the forthcoming minutes."

3:10 AM: A consultant in the CBS News studio working with Lesley Stahl at the House and Governors' Desk informs the CBS News Decision Desk of the huge drop in the Bush lead, and the CBS News Decision Team begins investigating the numbers. It also begins tracking numbers on the Florida Secretary of State's Web site and from the AP. While the three sets of numbers are different, all of them show that the race has narrowed tremendously. At this time, there is no report from VNS analyzing what has brought about this dramatic change.

3:32 AM: There has been much anticipation during the last half-hour about the expected Gore concession speech. Rather gives a possible and uncannily prescient explanation for Gore's absence: "It wouldn't surprise anybody, least of all your narrator, if Al Gore said, 'You know what? I am not going to concede this thing because it's just too close. I want somebody to get in there and recount those ballots'"

3:40 AM: Bush's lead drops to 6,060 votes.

At around this time, but he is not sure exactly when, CBS News President Andrew Heyward receives a call in the control room from Gore Campaign Chairman William Daley. It lasts less than a minute. Daley asks whether Heyward is aware of the dwindling Bush lead and whether CBS News is considering pulling back its call for Bush. Heyward is noncommittal and asks what Gore is planning to do. Daley says, "I'll get right back to you," hangs up and does not call back. There is more talk in the studio between Rather and the correspondents about the peculiarities now emerging in the Florida vote count.

They discuss the AP count of the decreasing margin for Bush.

3:48 AM: Rather says, "Now the situation at the moment is, nobody knows for a fact who has won Florida. Far be it from me to question one of our esteemed leaders [CBS management], but somebody needs to begin explaining why Florida has now not been pulled back to the undecided category." He goes on to say, "A senior Gore aide is quoted by Reuters as confirming that Gore has withdrawn [his] concession in the U.S. President race."

3:57 AM: The Bush margin has narrowed to fewer than 2,000 votes. Before the CBS News Decision Desk can officially advise a retraction, CBS News President Heyward, who has been watching the Bush lead melt away and listening to Rather and Bradley discuss the Florida situation, orders that CBS News retract the call for Bush.

4:05 AM: By this time, the other networks rescind the Florida call for Bush.

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4:10 AM: Bush's lead drops to 1,831 votes, which is roughly where it remains until the first recount.

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Analysis of the Call for Bush

The call was based entirely on the tabulated county vote. There were several data errors that were responsible for that mistake. The most egregious of the data errors has been well documented. Vote reports from Volusia County severely understated Gore's actual total when a faulty computer memory card reported votes that were off by thousands.

That precinct, Number 216, subtracted more than 16,000 votes from Gore's total and added votes to Bush's total. In addition, an apparent reporting error in Brevard County reduced Gore's total by an additional 4,000 votes.

The mistakes, both of which originated with the counties, were critical, since there were only about 3 percent of the state's precincts outstanding at this time. They incorrectly increased Bush's lead in the tabulated vote from about 27,000 to more than 51,000. Had it not been for these errors, the CBS News call for Bush at 2:17:52 AM would not have been made. While the errors should have been caught by VNS and CBS News analysts through a comparison of VNS data with data from the AP or the Florida Secretary of State, VNS computers could also have had a more sophisticated program that would have constantly compared one set of numbers with the others and raised a warning signal.

(Unlike the television networks, the Associated Press never called Florida for Bush, and, as we mentioned earlier, neither did VNS.) There was another problem: the VNS end-of-the-night model uses a straightforward projection of the number of precincts yet to report in each county. It assumes that the outstanding precincts in each county will be of average size and will vote in the same way as the precincts that have already reported from that county. However, at 2:17 AM there were more as-yet-uncounted votes than the model predicted. In fact, in Palm Beach County, a heavily Democratic area, there were three times as many votes yet to be reported as the model predicted. Some of that appears to be accounted for by the late release by county election officials of a large absentee vote.

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Conclusion

As we have seen above, the first Florida call for Gore was probably unavoidable, given the current system of projecting winners. Early in the evening, the sample that VNS selected to represent voters statewide overestimated Gore's lead, and a call was made for him. As the tabulated vote started accumulating, Gore lost his apparent lead, and a decision was made to take back the call. The ongoing VNS reviews have determined that the exit-poll sample of precincts in this election did not adequately represent the state.

The exit-poll sample estimated a significant Gore lead that never materialized. That fact remained unknown until the actual vote count. The sampling data and exit polling did not take into account the 12 percent of the Florida vote that was cast by absentee ballot, which also affected the quality of the data. The CBS News Decision Desk could not have known about these problems.

However, the second Florida call, the one for Bush, could have been avoided. It was based, as we have seen, on a combination of faulty tabulations entered into the total Florida vote, with an especially large error from Volusia County that exaggerated Bush's lead. Later, in the early morning hours, reports from large precincts in Palm Beach were recorded, along with a surge of absentee ballots from that county. When the Volusia County numbers were corrected and the new numbers from Palm Beach taken into account, the Bush lead shrank, and a decision was made to take back the Bush call. The call might have been avoided, if there had been better communication between the CBS News Decision Desk and the CBS News studio and newsgathering operations, which had been reporting ballot irregularities and large numbers of potentially Democratic votes still outstanding, and if the VNS vote totals had been checked against the ones from the AP and the Florida Secretary of State's Web site. The AP corrected the Volusia County error 35 minutes before VNS did, and one minute before CBS News made its call.

And, despite all the understandable focus on the Florida calls, they were not the only mistaken calls of the night.

***** EXTRACT FROM REPORT ENDS *****

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APPENDIX TWO – THE DIEBOLD MEMOS

Archive of Diebold Memos related to Volusia County 2000 incident

NOTE: The originals of these memos can be viewed online via a project located at: http://why-war.com/features/2003/10/diebold.html

CONTENTS

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To: Support "Support"

Subject: Memory card checksum errors (was: 2000 November Election)

From: Guy Lancaster

Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 11:41:08 -0800

Organization: Global Election Systems Inc.