[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 81 (Friday, June 23, 2000)]
[House]
[Page H5073]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[[Page H5073]]
              REGARDING THE HOUSE ELECTRONIC VOTING SYSTEM

  (Mr. THOMAS asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute.)
  Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, among my duties in my capacity as chairman 
of the Committee on House Administration is to oversee the officers of 
the House and the Office of the Clerk. In the 105th Congress, we 
changed our voting devices. Many folks have known that for years we 
have used electronic, as they say, voting cards, with the board visible 
behind us. The old system was an analog one in which the cards were 
physically punched and a reader read the holes in the cards. In the 
105th Congress, we installed, going from an analog, as the world is 
going, to a digital system. The new cards have a chip embedded in them. 
Since the 105th Congress, we have cast almost 1 million votes, and 
there have been no concerns or problems or anomalies, as we say, about 
the votes.
  It is my institutional responsibility to inform the Members that on 
Wednesday, June 21st, an anomaly occurred. A Member who was not here, 
who had possession of their voting card, was recorded as voting. It is 
not analogous to any of the situations in the past about the confusion 
of ``I didn't think I voted'' or as we found, unfortunately, the 
potential of someone else using the card. It is a true anomaly. Members 
might imagine the concerns that the staff and we had about this. It was 
the fact that a 64-bit string of digital numerals was somehow at a 
particular terminal read wrong, and ironically the wrong reading 
coincided with another set that was in fact a card set.
  You may have heard of the analogy of an eagle carrying a fish flying 
over the Sahara, they drop it and it hits you on the head. A billion to 
one, but it happened. Since Wednesday, we have tried to re-create the 
event in terms of dirtying up the cards, playing with the boxes, 
repeating a process. We have now gone through 500,000 cycles. We will 
continue as a fallback to cycle this to see if we can re-create the 
anomaly.
  It is one of those situations in which you really have to say it is a 
statistically improbable anomaly, but it occurred. As this majority has 
done from the very beginning, instead of not talking about it, instead 
of just letting it slide, we feel it incumbent upon us to come to the 
floor and announce there was a statistically improbable anomaly. We 
cannot explain it at this time; we will do everything in our power to 
explain it if it is explainable. Obviously, everyone is on the alert to 
make sure that notwithstanding that statistically improbable anomaly, 
we will make sure that every vote that is recorded is recorded 
accurately.

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