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>> some sociology students alleging studying
>> shaky, unprovable statistical anomalies in
>> Florida voting, even as the MIT/Caltech Voting
>> Project says there was no widespread fraud,
>> tampering, or errors).

Interesting -- the FIRST POSTER managed, in his reponse to a COMPLETELY UNRELATED article on internet porn (?!), to find a way to portray the work being done to find statistical evidence of irregularities in the tallying of the 2004 presidential election as "some sociology students" vs. "MIT / Caltech Voting Project".

As usual, right-wing propagandists and their dupes are attempting to use psychological perception management techniques to shut off a valid line of investigation and debate.

YOU'RE NOT FOOLING ANYONE. But unfortunately somebody needs to take the time to slap this stuff down.

The statistical evidence of an unexplained pro-Bush bias among counties in Florida using electronic voting machines is undeniable.

The only criticism (besides calling it "shaky" and "unproveable") I have heard of the UC Berkeley study, conducted by sociology professor Michael Hout, is that he could not possibly have taken into account additional factors like voter turn-out. But note, if voter turn-out were to explain the discrepancy, than for some reason voter turn-out would have had to have favored republicans more in counties using electronic voting.

I know of no reason why voter turn-out would favor republicans specifically in counties using electronic voting. But the details of Hout's stduy are beyond me, I admit. I think we can rely on his expertise.

However, the study done by Kathy Dopp, http://www.ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, is much simpler for us mere mortals to comprehend, and also makes its case very powerfully. The synopsis is at http://ustogether.org/election04/Liddle_Analysis.h tml and a map of the florida counties considered is at http://ustogether.org/election04/mitteldorf/Liddle .htm .

Key here -- there seems to be NO significant difference between the counties in Kathy Dopp's study EXCEPT how they tally their votes. Some of these counties are directly on one-another's borders, as you can see from the map.

And also a suggestion -- the Dixie-crat explanation is somewhat debunked by the above links. But it is very, very easy to see if an amazingly large percentage of registered democrats in these Florida counties decided to vote for Bush. We can just ask them. Nobody has forgotten who they voted for yet. Just take a poll. One thousand phone calls and you will know to within about 3 percent. I would really like to know, wouldn't you?

If you, like me, are sick of right-wing propagandists and their dupes trying these childish and transparent psychological tricks, please take the time to make a rebuttal. More on the right-wing propaganda machine at: http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2004/09/09_400. html and http://www.uspoliticsonline.com/forums/showthread. php?p=210686#post210686 .

Oh yeah, and let me save you some time. I wear a tin-foil hat to block the signals from the aliens, OK?

Now that I've given the standard right-wing progagandist name-calling attack myself, hopefully any replies to this post will have something SUBSTANTIVE to say.

>> some sociology students alleging studying
>> shaky, unprovable statistical anomalies in
>> Florida voting, even as the MIT/Caltech Voting
>> Project says there was no widespread fraud,
>> tampering, or errors).

Interesting -- the FIRST POSTER managed, in his reponse to a COMPLETELY UNRELATED article on internet porn (?!), to find a way to portray the work being done to find statistical evidence of irregularities in the tallying of the 2004 presidential election as "some sociology students" vs. "MIT / Caltech Voting Project".

As usual, right-wing propagandists and their dupes are attempting to use psychological perception management techniques to shut off a valid line of investigation and debate.

YOU'RE NOT FOOLING ANYONE. But unfortunately somebody needs to take the time to slap this stuff down.

The statistical evidence of an unexplained pro-Bush bias among counties in Florida using electronic voting machines is undeniable.

The only criticism (besides calling it "shaky" and "unproveable") I have heard of the UC Berkeley study, conducted by sociology professor Michael Hout, is that he could not possibly have taken into account additional factors like voter turn-out. But note, if voter turn-out were to explain the discrepancy, than for some reason voter turn-out would have had to have favored republicans more in counties using electronic voting.

I know of no reason why voter turn-out would favor republicans specifically in counties using electronic voting. But the details of Hout's stduy are beyond me, I admit. I think we can rely on his expertise.

However, the study done by Kathy Dopp, http://www.ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, is much simpler for us mere mortals to comprehend, and also makes its case very powerfully. The synopsis is at http://ustogether.org/election04/Liddle_Analysis.h tml and a map of the florida counties considered is at http://ustogether.org/election04/mitteldorf/Liddle .htm .

Key here -- there seems to be NO significant difference between the counties in Kathy Dopp's study EXCEPT how they tally their votes. Some of these counties are directly on one-another's borders, as you can see from the map.

And also a suggestion -- the Dixie-crat explanation is somewhat debunked by the above links. But it is very, very easy to see if an amazingly large percentage of registered democrats in these Florida counties decided to vote for Bush. We can just ask them. Nobody has forgotten who they voted for yet. Just take a poll. One thousand phone calls and you will know to within about 3 percent. I would really like to know, wouldn't you?

If you, like me, are sick of right-wing propagandists and their dupes trying these childish and transparent psychological tricks, please take the time to make a rebuttal. More on the right-wing propaganda machine at: http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2004/09/09_400. html and http://www.uspoliticsonline.com/forums/showthread. php?p=210686#post210686 .

Oh yeah, and let me save you some time. I wear a tin-foil hat to block the signals from the aliens, OK?

Now that I've given the standard right-wing progagandist name-calling attack myself, hopefully any replies to this post will have something SUBSTANTIVE to say.

>> some sociology students alleging studying
>> shaky, unprovable statistical anomalies in
>> Florida voting, even as the MIT/Caltech Voting
>> Project says there was no widespread fraud,
>> tampering, or errors).

Interesting -- the FIRST POSTER managed, in his reponse to a COMPLETELY UNRELATED article on internet porn (?!), to find a way to portray the work being done to find statistical evidence of irregularities in the tallying of the 2004 presidential election as "some sociology students" vs. "MIT / Caltech Voting Project".

As usual, right-wing propagandists and their dupes are attempting to use psychological perception management techniques to shut off a valid line of investigation and debate.

YOU'RE NOT FOOLING ANYONE. But unfortunately somebody needs to take the time to slap this stuff down.

The statistical evidence of an unexplained pro-Bush bias among counties in Florida using electronic voting machines is undeniable.

The only criticism (besides calling it "shaky" and "unproveable") I have heard of the UC Berkeley study, conducted by sociology professor Michael Hout, is that he could not possibly have taken into account additional factors like voter turn-out. But note, if voter turn-out were to explain the discrepancy, than for some reason voter turn-out would have had to have favored republicans more in counties using electronic voting.

I know of no reason why voter turn-out would favor republicans specifically in counties using electronic voting. But the details of Hout's stduy are beyond me, I admit. I think we can rely on his expertise.

However, the study done by Kathy Dopp, http://www.ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, is much simpler for us mere mortals to comprehend, and also makes its case very powerfully. The synopsis is at http://ustogether.org/election04/Liddle_Analysis.h tml and a map of the florida counties considered is at http://ustogether.org/election04/mitteldorf/Liddle .htm .

Key here -- there seems to be NO significant difference between the counties in Kathy Dopp's study EXCEPT how they tally their votes. Some of these counties are directly on one-another's borders, as you can see from the map.

And also a suggestion -- the Dixie-crat explanation is somewhat debunked by the above links. But it is very, very easy to see if an amazingly large percentage of registered democrats in these Florida counties decided to vote for Bush. We can just ask them. Nobody has forgotten who they voted for yet. Just take a poll. One thousand phone calls and you will know to within about 3 percent. I would really like to know, wouldn't you?

If you, like me, are sick of right-wing propagandists and their dupes trying these childish and transparent psychological tricks, please take the time to make a rebuttal. More on the right-wing propaganda machine at: http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2004/09/09_400. html and http://www.uspoliticsonline.com/forums/showthread. php?p=210686#post210686 .

Oh yeah, and let me save you some time. I wear a tin-foil hat to block the signals from the aliens, OK?

Now that I've given the standard right-wing progagandist name-calling attack myself, hopefully any replies to this post will have something SUBSTANTIVE to say.

Yes, to supplement my last post... you can find a map of the Florida showing the voting systems used here: http://ustogether.org/election04/mitteldorf/Liddle .htm Just eyeballing it, I can say with a fairly high level of confidence that every single touch-screen county (the blue ones) are run by Democrats.

Let's quit pretending with this silly fraud theory.

Blackboxvoting.org says otherwise, and their most recent posting shows that there seems to be deliberate voter fraud going on. You don't refuse to show citizens the signed copies of the vote tallies and then try to give them ones that are unsigned that have different totals, and dump the original copies into the trash all by accident.

There's also this report and the report that shows a significant and consistent difference in voting patterns in counties using Diebold electronic scanning machines. That's three different sources confirming that something is wrong based on three different investigative measures. How different ways does someone have to show that the totals don't add up?

A further followup on this was posted today.

http://ustogether.org/election04/dopp/dopp_respons e.html

Given the way the media has abused this story, that recent ./ article on Science and Balanced Journalism was very interesting to me.

http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/11/The_unexplai ned_exit_poll_discrepancy_v00k.pdf)

Everyone should do themselves the favor of reading the original material first. The parent post references a rehash of the original, and takes its graphs directly from the original. That is at: ...and the conclusion for the lazy is that there is enough of a discrepancy to merit an investigation. If you keep this link bookmarked, it is highly likely that a followup investigation will examine opscan versus electronic voting in other states, both battleground and non-battleground, to give us an impression as to whether the anomoly occurs only in certain states, like the exit poll anomolies did.

http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm

An investigation may be further merited by the claims of Jeff Fisher to have direct evidence of intentional fraud, and to have turned that over to the FBI. His homepage is
http://www.jefffisherforcongress.com/

1. Common Dreams report: Nice. Common Dreams. An extremely "progressive" (in their own words) news source with rave reviews from Bill Moyers and (go figure) Ralph Nader, which Don Imus (of MSNBC) calls "a must read from the left". Hmmm....
2. optically scanned votes have a strange anomoly: From UsTogether.org, a web site dedicated to "peace, democracy, and well-being". The list of local resources display a myriad of internet sites dedicated to the Democratic and Green parties, and ONLY to those parties. Hardly an unbiased news source.
3. 88,000 more votes than there were voters: While I couldn't find a clear agenda on their site, the article referenced in the posting has already been updated with the fact that Palm Beach County had no such discrepancy. If you look at the page that the Washington Dispatch quotes, the actual numbers from Palm Beach County are quite different. In fact, there were 544,378 votes cast for President from 547,340 voters that turned out, showing 2,962 voters that never cast a vote for President, as opposed to the 88,000 votes over voter turnout that the article claims. Interesting...
4. discounted 50,000 voters: CmdrTaco claims this took place in LaPorte, Michigan ... when it actually took place in LaPorte, Indiana. This shows a complete lack of effort to verify this data. LaPorte was, in fact, a problem. They believe it was due to a power surge of some sort. They are still working on sorting through the mess there and are still counting ballots and working to certify the election there. At any rate, to state they "discounted 50,000 voters" is not only misleading, it's flat out wrong. In fact, the current data from LaPorte, INDIANA states that they had 43,278 voters voting (with 42,582 votes being cast for President) with just over 79,309 voters registered. That's a 55% turnout for that county, which is just about on par with the rest of the state. Whie I have yet to see viable precinct-by-precinct data for that county, it's clear that "discounting 50,000 voters" is not what happened at all. Incidentally, for all you Kerry fans out there, Kerry actually had more votes in this county.
5. gave Bush an extra 4,000 votes: Oh. My. $DIETY. The county in which this took place, still shows more votes for KERRY than for Bush. However, this is actually a problem if you look at the (still unofficial) data from Franklin County. The key here is that the document here referenced is UNOFFICIAL, and even CNN (left as they are) admits to that. The offical tally for Bush in that precinct is 365 votes. Perhaps the headline should read "Glitch gave Bush extra votes in Ohio According to an Unofficial Document That is Only Used by the Media".
6. counting backwards: Again, a valid probl

Ah, that is a rather damning piece of information that I was not aware of. Looking at these numbers in light of that information gives a somewhat different perspective on them, and certainly removes some of my incredulity about fraud collaboration.

There is still a big question about how much of this is explained by geography and cultural differences between parts of Florida, but I'm willing to admit that there is at least a possibility that this could indicate large scale biases intentionally inserted into some of the voting systems used in key swing states.

The e-touch optical scan comparison referenced as 'strange anomaly' may be explained if one considers that counties with small populations used optical machines and those with large populations used the e-touch machines. Bush's campaigners focused on the demographic more likely to be found in rural areas. The red vs blue by county results and the swing from expected to actual vote in rural Florida suggest it was a pretty successful campaign. I know some of the progressive democrats are painting this as an ignorant, rural, right-wing christian uprising. The variation in swing vote as a function of population size, supports at least the 'rural' aspect of their claimed uprising.

The remainder has been pretty well covered by other /. posters

In the very article referenced by commandantTaco one reads (if on is able) "...Palm Beach County appears to have accounted for the discrepancy..."

I guess the article from Aa href="http://www.michigancityin.com/articles/2004/ 11/04/news/news02.txt">Laporte Michigan might lead one to believe: poll workers experienced a huge operator error; election systems and software only sold ONE system and it's fscked; one, the other, or both of the aforementioned parties conspired to screw up the count. The traditional trick is extra vote, not tossing a huge number in the $hitcan. My bet is operatorerror. I mean no one ever screws up when using a computer!

Reading the Broward County article we learn, "Bad numbers showed up only in running tallies through the day, not the final one."

The bit from NM doesn't reflect much weirdness. Obviously all those folks that were too ignorant to check their paper MUST have been Bush supporters.

Folks, so many people are involved in elections at so many different levels that there is literally no way that any central entity could rig an election across an entire state.

• no

Folks, so many people are involved in elections at so many different levels that there is literally no way that any central entity could rig an election across an entire state.

• no

It appears that quite a lot of the actual counted votes in some of the opti-scan counties in Florida look suspiciously like the counts have been given to the wrong candidate. If not then why would less than a third of the dem voters vote dem while the reps get more than double (in Calhoun it's closer to 500%) the count of registered Reps. It almost looks like a systemic failure that occurred in a number of counties.

In Baker for example there were 8926 registered Dems but only 2180 kerry votes, while there were
3126 registered reps but they got 7738 votes. In Liberty the figures look even worse 1927 Rep votes from 320 registered (600% up) while there were 1070 Dem votes from 3597 registered (down to under a third).

Unless people honestly believe that the dem vote was only 25% of registrations while the rep vote was 250% then it would indicate the wrong tally was allocated to the candidates. Apparently the exit polls for Baker county were out by a massive margin as well. (In fact there were more positive Dem responses then dem votes and generally the exit polls run around 50%.)

Now it is curious that the worst of these data irregularities are in the smaller counties, but it would also be these smaller counties that may well have had less money for testing etc. In larger counties it appears that the Repub vote is around +5 to +10% over registrations while the Dems are -10 to -50% under. In Duval the reps are 29000 up while the dems are 80000 down compared to raw registrations.

If you reverse the figures then both parties are running a lot closer to the raw registration figures but with the Reps still getting an extra percentage boost compared to Dems over their registrations.

It is certainly curious why publicised faults and problems are all benefitting the republicans though. What are the odds of 200+ errors across the country (depending on which site you look at) almost all going the republican way.

The data is available from a number of sources but has been tabulated below.

A 'friendly' representation of florida data
http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats. htm
Graphic of the worst 8 small counties
http://www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm

Raw Stats -
Returns by county
http://election.dos.state.fl.us/pdf/canvassing1.pd f
Registrations by county
http://election.dos.state.fl.us/voterreg/pdf/2004/ 2004pppParty.pdf

By the way I didn't vote, I am simply a very concerned world/Aussie citizen.

Democraticunderground.com Forum Post
More Data (link also available within the above forum post)

Take a look at: Florida Election Results which contains the county by county results of the election in Florida and compares these results to the percentage of registered democrats and republicans in each county.

Unless the people that compiled the tables are lying their hats off, it appears that their was either selective mass conversion of democrats into republicans in certain counties or there was election fraud.

This is not conclusive evidence of election fraud but it certainly needs to be better explained before I am willing to admit that "Bush won fair and square".

Your mileage may vary.

Your mileage may vary.

stolenelection2004.com
votergate.tv
Outrage in Ohio
Was the Ohio Election Honest and Fair?
Kerry Won
Shoplifting the Presidency?
Ultimate Felony Against Democracy

Surprising Pattern of Florida's Election Results
votes for party president versus voters registered
exit_poll(gif)
Florida2004chart

openvotingconsortium.org
verifiedvoting.org/eirs
electionprotection2004.org
The Rise of Open-Source Politics
cpsr.net

Presume once congress & the administration are aware to the purported problems they'll respond rapidly with "Help America Vote Act - II".

stolenelection2004.com
votergate.tv
Outrage in Ohio
Was the Ohio Election Honest and Fair?
Kerry Won
Shoplifting the Presidency?
Ultimate Felony Against Democracy

Surprising Pattern of Florida's Election Results
votes for party president versus voters registered
exit_poll(gif)
Florida2004chart

openvotingconsortium.org
verifiedvoting.org/eirs
electionprotection2004.org
The Rise of Open-Source Politics
cpsr.net

Presume once congress & the administration are aware to the purported problems they'll respond rapidly with "Help America Vote Act - II".

stolenelection2004.com
votergate.tv
Outrage in Ohio Was the Ohio Election Honest and Fair?
Kerry Won
Shoplifting the Presidency?
Ultimate Felony Against Democracy

Surprising Pattern of Florida's Election Results
votes for party president versus voters registered
exit_poll(gif)
Florida2004chart

openvotingconsortium.org
verifiedvoting.org/eirs
electionprotection2004.org
The Rise of Open-Source Politics
http://www.cpsr.net

Presume once congress & the administration are aware to the purported problems they respond rapidly with "Help America Vote Act - II".

The deeper you dig the more dirt piles up.

Mandate
this
lying
cheating
sinners.

Remember what Jimmy Carter said? "Voting arrangements in Florida do not meet "basic international requirements" and could undermine the US election."

Check this out: http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm. It shows how much the vote has changed county-by-county in Florida. The expected votes column is based on 2000 election data. So in other words if people vote more or less like they did in 2000, then the democratic and republican totals are listed.

Several things jump out:

1. Optical scan machines in Florida seem to be squashing Democratic votes and pumping Republican votes to implausible numbers for many small Republican counties.

2. Some of the highest turnout percentages should be in Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach Counties. Yet the machines are reporting low percentages. Beware, this may be a red herring since so many voted early with mail-ins.

3. Liberty county is really unusual, Democratic registration at 88% of county, Republicans at 7.9%, with 4,075 registered voters. But the tally says 712% voted Rep and it was -59.9% for Dems. That is 1,927 voted Republican and 1,070 vot Democratic. That's a lot of changed votes!

Hopefully this will be looked at by many eyes, and not squashed under some Patriot act thing....