Cheating Allegations...The Truth about Bush 2000

[freedomburns]

This is all rediculous. Republicans are saying that 'it was so yesterday'. If you cheated...and got away with it....it can't be yesterday. Throughout Rutherford B. Hayes term...people called him a liar. As an American, I have the right to express my feelings, and this means a lot to me. First of all, a report said Gore would've won by at least 2,000 votes from African-Americans, which would've made him president. Mrs. Harris, the Chairman of Bush 2000, and the vote counter in Florida in 2000 used disenfranchising to help Bush.

This is no 'Fahrenheit Propaganda' or anything of it. I'm just telling you all what happened that night. None of you Republicans have answered my question....

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Cites? Links? CREDIBLE Proof? Both sides cheat. IF they did, so be it. Lets move on.

Here is some proof SR.  I think we all agree that statistics can tell you a big part of the story.  More proof is coming, and where there's smoke, there's fire.

freedomburns

http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_15415.shtml

 
 

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Editor's Note | A copy of the working paper, raw data and other information used in the study described below can be found here. - wrp
    Go to Original

    UC Berkeley Research Team Sounds 'Smoke Alarm' for Florida E-Vote Count
    By UC Berkeley

    Thursday 18 November 2004

Research team calls for investigation.
    Today the University of California's Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team released a statistical study - the sole method available to monitor the accuracy of e- voting - reporting irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods - what the team says can be deemed a "smoke alarm." Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance - the probability is less than 0.1 percent. The research team formally disclosed results of the study at a press conference today at the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center, where they called on Florida voting officials to investigate.

    The three counties where the voting anomalies were most prevalent were also the most heavily Democratic: Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, respectively. Statistical patterns in counties that did not have e-touch voting machines predict a 28,000 vote decrease in President Bush's support in Broward County; machines tallied an increase of 51,000 votes - a net gain of 81,000 for the incumbent. President Bush should have lost 8,900 votes in Palm Beach County, but instead gained 41,000 - a difference of 49,900. He should have gained only 18,400 votes in Miami-Dade County but saw a gain of 37,000 - a difference of 19,300 votes.

    "For the sake of all future elections involving electronic voting - someone must investigate and explain the statistical anomalies in Florida," says Professor Michael Hout. "We're calling on voting officials in Florida to take action."

    The research team is comprised of doctoral students and faculty in the UC Berkeley sociology department, and led by Sociology Professor Michael Hout, a nationally-known expert on statistical methods and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center.

    For its research, the team used multiple-regression analysis, a statistical method widely used in the social and physical sciences to distinguish the individual effects of many variables on quantitative outcomes like vote totals. This multiple-regression analysis takes into account of the following variables by county:

number of voters
median income
Hispanic/Latino population
change in voter turnout between 2000 and 2004
support for Senator Dole in the 1996 election
support for President Bush in the 2000 election
use of electronic voting or paper ballots
    "No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained," said Hout. "The study shows, that a county's use of electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this appearing in a population where the true difference is zero - less than once in a thousand chances."

    The data used in this study came from public sources including CNN.com, the 2000 US Census, and the Verified Voting Foundation. For a copy of the working paper, raw data and other information used in the study can be found at: http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/.
 

[freedomburns]

That's not the point of the study.  Even if it is over, it needs to be fixed, and it certainly doesn't lend the President any more of a mandate to know that the election was extremely close, and some shady shenanigans took place.  Numbers don't lie.

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[freedomburns]

Machines may not have "bias", but they do have error rates.  It's not always the voter's fault if the machine fails to read their ballot.  Surely, your copier, printer, etc. has not always functioned properly, to put it mildly.

There is a vastly important difference between error and bias.

Let's say we have vote counting machines that systemically shreaded 10% of the ballots into tiny pieces.

This is actually a fair count, in the sense that no candidate gets an advantage.  Provided the machines shreaded the same % of ballots in all counties, the outcome of the election is (within the limits of probability) unchanged.

By contrast, here is a key finding of the ballot review the media did of Florida 2000:

Although trained to produce accurate, impartial reports, the NORC investigators are human and prone to human judgment and error. In particular, NORC discovered that male investigators were more likely to record marks on ballots than women. NORC also found a slight but statistically significant relationship between candidate marks and the investigators' party affiliation.

This is a bias or systemic error.  529 votes out of 6 million is something like  a factor of 0.000091.

Here even a TINY bias could tip the balance one way or the other.

A machine, even if tragically flawed to the point that it missed even 10% of the ballots would be better than the humans because it would have no systemic bias.  The 10% of votes it shreads have identical probabilities of being for either candidate, so unlike the humans it may be flawed, but is still fair.

Neither of the above options are acceptable in my opinion.  The only acceptable answer is a Constitutionally granted right to vote for electors, and a Federally mandated, nation-wide system of tabulation that records every vote with miniscule fallibility.  We have the technology, we have the means, the only thing holding this idea back is that one party thinks it will benefit from it, and one thinks it won’t

As Americans, I wish we gave voting a higher priority.  I think that most other countries are better at this (Democracy) than we are. 

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