The Election of 2002

Even with the advantage of Bush’s popularity and the national security issues, Republicans did resort to some chicanery in the 2002 by-elections. New Hampshire Republicans successfully jammed Democratic telephone lines, preventing them from making get-out-the-vote calls. The Republican Party spent $2,500,000 in the unsuccessful defense of James Tobin, who orchestrated this, and four years later it developed that on November 5-6, 2002, he made 22 calls to the White House. Tobin was sentenced to ten months in prison, but the ties to the White House were not pursued. In Georgia, the defeat of Senator Max Cleland in 2002, up to then considered untouchable, has been questioned. Cleland is a triple amputee who lost those limbs in the service of his country. His opponent, Saxby Chambliss, trailed Cleland by 5 points and was claiming that Cleland was a coward and traitor for not giving Bush 100% support on Iraq. Cleland lost by 7 points. Democratic Governor Roy Barnes was leading his opponent by eleven points but ended up losing to Sonny Perdue by five points. In October 2003, a former Diebold subcontractor in Georgia reported that Diebold technicians reprogrammed 20,000 touch screen machines in 2002 after the state had certified that the machines were in working order. Technicians were ordered not to inform the Board of Elections of what had occurred. Diebold has denied the charge. Diebold is the nation’s largest election services contractor. Reprogramming was ostensibly undertaken because some of the machines were crashing. A number of employees admit to secretly placing a software “patch” on voting machines.

It is possible that memory cards from the touch screen machines could be removed and manipulated in such a way as to show how the machines were working and whether errors were made. In addition, 67 machines in Fulton County, Georgia lost their memory cards so no votes were recorded. The cards were never found, and Georgia authorities showed no interest in examining why the 2200 new machines were showing results that differed so markedly from recent polling. Recent tests of touch screen machines in Florida revealed that sometimes people would vote for one name while another appeared as the person for whom they had voted. Alert voters in Miami Dade and Broward Counties were able to identify this problem in 2002 before much damage had been done. As of 2004, five of its top managers, including Vice President Jeff Dean, had been convicted of felonies.


Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum