by Brian A. Boone - Vol 2 Issue 16

An examination of electronic balloting equipment used in the 2000 presidential election has revealed that a Y2K glitch is responsible for George W. Bush winning that year's heated contest.

Federal Computerized Voting, a lobby group that supports electronic and computerized balloting to increase voter turnout and eliminate human counting errors, conducted a thorough inspection of its electronic polling booths in preparation for this year's upcoming election season. Repeated errors led them to investigate the machine's operating systems which revealed tell-tale signs of malfunction and data misinterpretation due to a Y2K bug.

"We assumed that any computer problems relating to the Y2K problem would manifest themselves on January 1st, 2000. As it were, many embedded computer microchips malfunctioned arbitrarily throughout the year," said Kathy Miller, chairperson of Federal Computerized Voting. "The internal computer memory in our voting equipment led to a grave miscounting of the votes cast in the presidential election."

FCV programmers were able to recover all the data lost during the November 2000 election. The results are startling to say the least: of 98 million votes cast, only 1,249 were for Bush. He likely would not have covered the Electoral College.

"Ironically, the housebound and illegal immigrant-heavy Florida had extremely low voter turnout that day, with just under 250 people voting and all of them for Bush," Miller said. "He would have won it fair and square."

Former Vice President Al Gore, the overwhelmingly true winner of the election, expressed both happiness and remorse.

"I want to thank the tireless people on my campaign and legal staff who never stopped believing that I legitimately won the election," he said from his Tennessee home. "But I am saddened that the very technology I invented, computers, would fail me when I needed them the most."

A transfer of power will not be forthcoming. President Bush has dismissed the findings as "machinations of evil from a demonic box." He went on to eliminate America's process of democratic elections, citing it as a "threat to national security."