Slashdot Mirror
Berkeley Researchers Analyze Florida Voting Patterns
empraptor writes "Researchers at UC Berkeley have crunched numbers and determined that 130,000-260,000 excess votes went to Bush in Florida. They have held a conference and posted their findings online. You can find articles on their research from CNet, Wired News, and many other sources. While the research used statistical analysis based on past elections and demographics, how else do you verify that a paperless voting system is working properly?"
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=239735 (video)
/10/internet_buzz_on_vote_fraud_is_dismissed/
Doug Chapin, a nonpartisan election analyst, finds the claims to be baseless. "There were no problems that would lead me to believe that there were stolen elections or widespread fraud," he said.
"There was no overwhelming reason to cast doubt on the outcome of this election," seconded Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, the campaign manager for Al Gore's 2000 campaign. "George Bush got more votes this time."
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/11
Much of the traffic is little more than Internet-fueled conspiracy theories, and none of the vote-counting problems and anomalies that have emerged are sufficiently widespread to have affected the election's ultimate result.
Kerry campaign officials and a range of election-law specialists agree that while machines made errors and long lines in Democratic precincts kept many voters away, there's no realistic chance that Kerry actually beat Bush.
''No one would be more interested than me in finding out that we really won, but that ain't the case," said Jack Corrigan, a veteran Kerry adviser who led the Democrats' team of 3,600 attorneys who fanned out across the country on Election Day to address voting irregularities.
''I get why people are frustrated, but they did not steal this election," Corrigan said. ''There were a few problems here and there in the election. But unlike 2000, there is no doubt that they actually got more votes than we did, and they got them in the states that mattered."
''I think it's safe to say that on the votes that were cast in Ohio, Bush won," said Dan Tokaji, a law professor at Ohio State University who is working with the ACLU to challenge Ohio's use of punch-card ballots. ''If the margin had been 36,000 rather than 136,000, we would have seen another post-election meltdown."
http://www.sacbee.com/state_wire/story/11436220p-1 2350492c.html
All three said their networks had set up investigative units to review any claims of voter fraud or problems with electronic voting technology this year, but that nothing significant had appeared anywhere to affect the election's outcome.
"A lot of the allegations we've looked into, they're just not true," Shapiro said. "Believe me, I'd love a juicy story about the election as much as anybody. Florida was a great story, but it's just not there this time."
A frequent charge levied after the 2000 election was voter disenfranchisement and ballot spoilage due, in large part, to antiquated, malfunctioning, or broken mechanical voting equipment. Legislation was introduced guaranteeing a minimum standard for the equipment and processes associated with voting in all jurisdictions. Since we are living in the 21st century, electronic systems were specified. $3.9 billion was set aside under HAVA to replace all mechanical punch card systems with electronic systems by 1 January, 2006. The goal is to ensure a consistency and fairness in the appearance and operation of the voting systems, both for voters and local election officials.
After the 2000 presidential election, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA):
To establish a program to provide funds to States to replace punch card voting systems, to establish the Election Assistance Commission to assist in the administration of Federal elections and to otherwise provide assistance with the administration of certain Federal election laws and programs, to establish minimum election administration standards for
Read the abstract, if not the actual paper; it's a little deeper than that. It says that Bush got more votes than expected, and that the counties where he got larger-than-expected numbers of votes are the same counties that used electronic voting, to a statistically significant level.
A frequent charge levied after the 2000 election was voter disenfranchisement and ballot spoilage due, in large part, to antiquated, malfunctioning, or broken mechanical voting equipment. Legislation was introduced guaranteeing a minimum standard for the equipment and processes associated with voting in all jurisdictions. Since we are living in the 21st century, electronic systems were specified. $3.9 billion was set aside under HAVA to replace all mechanical punch card systems with electronic systems by 1 January, 2006. The goal is to ensure a consistency and fairness in the appearance and operation of the voting systems, both for voters and local election officials.
After the 2000 presidential election, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA):
To establish a program to provide funds to States to replace punch card voting systems, to establish the Election Assistance Commission to assist in the administration of Federal elections and to otherwise provide assistance with the administration of certain Federal election laws and programs, to establish minimum election administration standards for States and units of local government with responsibility for the administration of Federal elections...
The putative reasoning for going with electronic systems was likely that since we have managed to design accountable and reliable electronic and computing equipment for the management of our power, medical care, money, etc., it likely was more or less assumed by the legislature that such accountable systems could also be applied to voting.
A bill has been introduced to amend HAVA. H.R.2239 and its twin Senate counterpart S.1980, discussed further here, will amend the Help America Vote Act such that there is "a voter-verified permanent record or hardcopy" attached with each and every ballot cast by every voter, and that "any voting system containing or using software shall disclose the source code of that software to the Commission, and the Commission shall make that source code available for inspection upon request to any citizen".
Additionally, the three electronic voting manufacturers already have the ability to add permanent, individual voter-verified paper audit trails to their products. Some e-voting critics make it seem like vendors are resisting. However, it is the local election boards that are resisting (as well as the slow march of bureaucracy). The e-voting vendors will build - and sell - whatever municipalities will buy.
The point of paper receipts is that you don't keep it, you verify it and then put it in a regular ballot box. That way if there's any question about the electronic tally, there can be a manual recount.
So we have about a month for the electoral college to change its mind.
I would like to point out one extremely important fact. This paper was not published in a journal. This was a simple statistical analysis by four students.
Let the scientific method work this out. If a paper has merit, let it be analyzed by stastic professionals, and if it does have merit, any statistical journal would be happy to run a major news story that would give them publicitiy.
But too many of these wannabe statiticians are not publishing their results. They make unrelaistic assumptions, they use questionable approaches to making claims, they don't use enough variables (in the case of this report, they didn't even factor in Nader!) And when they find something they believe is significant, they bypass the scientific method completely, and rush straight to internet blogs or PRNewswire.
Again, let the scientific method take its course, and be very cautious of anything that doesn't.
Neat trick, considering that no Florida county uses Diebold e-voting machines.
This can still be messed with. When the binary is read (to do the byte-compare, or to compute a digital signature), the machine can return the "correct" binary, while it was actually running a hacked binary.
You still need a paper trail. The ballots can be counted, doublechecked, you can use 2, or 3, or N groups of people with whatever affiliation. This is where vote security lies.
I live in New Hampshire. When I voted, my local voting place was using a Diebold optical scanner vote box. Just like any other paranoid slashbot, I don't trust Diebold. But I do trust optical scan ballots, because when the numbers become contested, real people can do a recount.
RTFA:
As students of the federal budget know, the citizens of some states pay more in taxes than they get back from Uncle Sam in grants and benefits. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan commissioned frequent studies that showed how New York was getting the shaft. Arnold Schwarzenegger was stunned to learn upon taking office that for every dollar Californians send to Washington, they get back only 77 cents--an imbalance that topped $50 billion in 2003.
linkus jucius
1) Pen and paper doesn't take forever to count. In Canada, we can get federal election results approximately 3 hours after polls close, and they're all pencil and paper. Just because the US has a larger population doesn't mean it'll take longer, just hire more people to count and that's it.
2) If the losing candidate questions the vote, he and his opponent can both witness the recount. One can hardly question again after having witnessed the recount.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
29 precincts in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, reported votes cast IN EXCESS of the number of registered voters - at least 93,136 extra votes total.
official Cuyahoga County Board of Elections website
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
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?
Fanatically anti-fanatical