• A replacement set of votes was uploaded on the Diebold machines (then called Global Election Systems) in Volusia County about one hour after the original votes.
• The original votes were on “copy 0” of the memory card containing the vote database. The replacement votes were tagged to a “copy 3.” (Card 3 held negative 16,000 Gore votes.)
• According to an internal memo written by Diebold Election Systems Sr. V.P. of Research and Development Talbot Iredale, the second set of votes should not have been done and may have been “unauthorized.”
• In the replacement vote set, totals for all races were correct except for the presidential race.
• According to CBS documents, the erroneous 20,000 votes in Volusia was directly responsible for calling the election for Bush.
• Brevard County, Florida also used Global Election Systems (now Diebold) voting machines. Brevard omitted 4,000 votes for Gore from its tally, which contributed to the decision by the networks to call for Bush.
• The two erroneous county totals came directly from the central tabulating system for the county. The GEMS program is Diebold’s central tabulation software.

Read the emails yourself - look in the thread "RE: Memory card checksum errors (was: 2000 November Election)," and in particular Lana Hires ("I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here 'looking dumb'"), Talbot Iredale ("If this problem is to be properly answered we need to determine where the 'second' memory card is or whether it even exists. I do know that there were two uploads from two different memory cards (copy 0 (master) and copy 3)."), two from John McLaurin the paranoid ("Sophia and Tab may be able to shed some light here, keeping in mind that the boogie man may me reading our mail." and "One concern I’ve had all along is “if” we are getting the full story from Lana."), and lead developer Ken Clark ("About the only constructive suggestion I have is to insert a line in the AV upload code to check that candvotes + undervotes = votefor*timescounted. If it happens, punt. That would have at least prevented the embarrassment of negative votes, which is really what this is all about. Then John can go to Lana and tell her it has never happened before and that it will never happen again.")

If it is true that someone reprogrammed a voting card and adjusted the total count so that Bush won, do you think that person still laughing their ass off or are they terrified?

To focus on the positive, at least we have evidence that something fishy happened. Last time. We won't in 2004, because the new voting machines don't have any paper trail, just electronic data programmed in Microsoft Access and stored on machines exposed to the internet without passwords.