Elections & Electronic Voting

Jim's Summary - updated Nov 19, 2004

As many of you know I have been following electronic voting related issues for several years. Based on my review of the best information I can find, here’s my current working hypothesis:

The early exit polling was correct, indicating that Bush lost in the key swing states Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa (download PDF). However, over the course of the night the "official" polling results were gradually added to the pure exit polling numbers to make the two agree, thus corrupting the exit polling data, which has not been publicly preserved.

There was fraudulent manipulation of the election results in key swing states, and counties in swing states, controlled by extremely partisan Republican officials, including Florida, Ohio and parts of New Mexico as well as other swing states.

A large part of this was apparently done by manipulating centralized computer tabulation of the vote totals. The same method that was very likely employed in Florida late on election night in 2000.

Within states with electronic voting, the early studies appeared to show more discrepancy in counties using optical scan as opposed to DRE (touch screen) equipment, at least where these results were first analyzed in detail in Florida and New Hampshire. It is plausible that this was due to the heightened press coverage and attention focused on touch screen voting issues prior to the election.

In small rural Democratic counties in Florida using optical scan voting, the Bush victory margins exactly match the Democratic majorities, i.e. in a county that was 5:2 Democratic, Bush supposedly "won" by 5:2, etc., suggesting that somebody may have simply switched the totals in a computer database. Bev Harris and Howard Dean demonstrated how anybody who can edit a spread sheet could do this in 90 seconds if they had access to the PC computer.

A new statistical study of touch screen voting in Florida from UC Berkeley's Quantitative Methods Research Team reports that the three counties where the voting anomalies were most prevalent were also the most heavily Democratic: Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, respectively, where Bush received about 150,000 more votes than statistically expected as a result of electronic voting. Statewide he received as many as 260,000 more - the statistical probability of this is less than 0.1 percent.

The most important correlation with all of these "irregularities" may be with partisan officials in control of the process rather than with which particular technology was used.

The optical scan results in particular do have a paper trail and thus manipulation of those results would be vulnerable to show up in a recount, if one could be mounted in states controlled by Republican election officials.

There are several lines of activity that look promising:

1. Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Co-Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus proclaims that a complete tally of the results is underway in Ohio prior to official certification on December 3rd. If the margin is less than one quarter of one percent after the official tally is completed (about 16,000 votes) an automatic recount occurs under Ohio law. Candidates in the race can also request a recount no matter what the margin.
   


2. Third party candidates have standing to request recounts of the vote if they can pay for them. In Ohio the Green Party candidate David Cobb and the Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik have announced that they have raised $150,000 in donations to meet filing fees and expenses, and are now trying to raise an additional $100,000 for "training, mobilizing, and per diem expenses" for the "thousands" who will be involved in the statewide effort. Nader has also won the right to recount in NH where the cost is estimated at around $50,000.
   


3. There is one independent non-partisan entity, Votewatch, which collected enough independent statistically validated exit polling data in Ohio and New Mexico to consider mounting a challenge before the results are certified in early December. Last I heard they are optimistic about raising the $250,000 they will need to pay for the statistical analysis necessary to find out if they have a case to legally challenge the results in Ohio. http://votewatch.us
   


4. Bev Harris has filed several thousand freedom of information act requests for relevant information in Ohio, Florida and other key swing states. She has been the one consistent voice calling attention to this issue since long before the election and desperately needs support. http://www.blackboxvoting.org
   


5. A congressional delegation is asking for an official investigation of the election by the General Accounting Office. MoveOn has launched a campaign in support of this effort. This could be important as it moves the story into a realm that it will be more difficult for the media to ignore. http://www.moveon.org/investigatethevote

It would appear that the mainstream U.S. broadcast news media is still avoiding much coverage of the story, with the notable exception of Keith Oberman on MSNBC. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/

Dark as it looks right now we should remember that within two years of Nixon's landslide victory over McGovern he had resigned in disgrace over offences that look tame in comparison to this election.

Report on the Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy - Nov 10, 2004
http://www.planetwork.net/ExitPollDiscrepancy.pdf to download PDF

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