ELECTION FRAUD! And No... I Won't Give it a Rest!

A study by faculty and graduate students and led by University of California at Berkeley Professor Michael Hout has concluded that President Bush was likely erroneously awarded between 130,000 and 260,000 votes in Florida alone, with 72,000 of them being in the largely Democratic Broward County alone.

The survey, which is the most comprehensive and detailed analysis of Florida’s 2004 election results to date, found that compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show gains for Bush between 2000 and 2004.

Unlike other analyses, this survey accounted for and ruled out other demographic factors which have clouded the results of other studies, such as the “dixiecrat” phenomenon, where Democratic counties have supported Republican nominees in the past.


The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections

http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/
Summary:

* Irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000 excess votes or more to President George W. Bush in Florida.

* Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for President Bush between 2000 and 2004. This effect cannot be explained by differences between counties in income, number of voters, change in voter turnout, or size of Hispanic/Latino population.

* In Broward County alone, President Bush appears to have received approximately 72,000 excess votes.

* We can be 99.9% sure that these effects are not attributable to chance.

Details:

Because many factors impact voting results, statistical tools are necessary to see the effect of touch-screen voting. Multipleregression analysis is a statistical technique widely used in the social and physical sciences to distinguish the individual effects of many variables. This multiple-regression analysis takes account of the following variables by county:

* number of voters
* median income
* Hispanic population
* change in voter turnout between 2000 and 2004
* support for President Bush in 2000 election
* support for Dole in 1996 election

When one controls for these factors, the association between electronic voting and increased support for President Bush is impossible to overlook. The data show with 99.0% certainty that a county’s use of electronic voting is associated with a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush.

The data used in this study come from CNN.com, the 2000 US Census, the Florida Department of State, and the Verified Voting Foundation – all publicly available sources. This study was carried out by a group of doctoral students in the UC Berkeley sociology department in collaboration with Professor Michael Hout, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center.

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to quote an appropriate voice on the subject, "aw shaddup!"

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If Berkeley had their way, Mao Zte Tung would win the election.

Updated On: 11/18/04 at 04:45 PM

US Election: Democracy in Question
by Ritt Goldstein

STOCKHOLM - John Zogby, president of the polling firm Zogby International, told IPS he has been calling it "the Armageddon election" for about a year. Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader believes the Republican Party was able to "steal it before election day."

Facts suggest something went very wrong on Nov. 2.

Speculation focuses upon a number of questions -- purposeful miscounts, anomalies surrounding electronic voting (e-voting) machines, particularly the optical scan types; and numerous reports of voting "irregularities" in heavily Democratic areas.

"What they 'do' is minorities," Nader said, highlighting the thrust of Republican efforts, "and make sure that there aren't enough voting machines for the minority areas. They have to wait in line ... for hours, and most of them don't. There are all kinds of ways, and that's why I was quoted as saying, "this election was hijacked from A to Z," Nader told IPS.

Zogby was concerned about the difference between some of the exit polls (surveys of individuals who have just cast ballots) and the official vote counts. "We're talking about the Free World here," he pointedly noted.

On Nov. 10, University of Pennsylvania Professor Steven F Freeman, whose expertise includes "research methods," compiled an analysis entitled 'The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy'. The document was prepared in view of the unusually large differences between what exit polls had predicted and the recorded vote tallies.

His findings suggest Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry should have received far more votes than he did.

In three of the key battleground states -- Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania -- Freeman's analysis states the odds of Kerry receiving the percentage of votes recorded, given the exit poll findings, were less than three in one thousand, per state.

Freeman also determined that the odds of any two of these states simultaneously reaching their stated vote tallies were "on the order of one-in-a-million," and the odds of all three states arriving at the vote counts they did "are 250 million to one."

"Something is definitely wrong," said Zogby.

Highlighting both the expected accuracy of exit polls and the significant disparity that Kerry's defeat illustrated, Republican consultant, commentator and Fox-TV News regular Dick Morris wrote an article, 'Those Faulty Exit Polls Were Sabotage', suggesting a pollster conspiracy to swing the election for Kerry.

In doing so he, perhaps inadvertently, provided ammunition for arguments from the opposite side -- that the exit polls were correct but the final results were fudged. "Exit polls are almost never wrong," argued Morris, and in 10 of the 11 key states they had predicted significantly fewer votes for Republican President George W Bush than he was eventually credited with.

In New Hampshire, Bush tallied a surprising 9.5 percent more votes than predicted, the most significant difference in any of the key states.

Morris observed that outside the United States, exit polls are often used to provide a check on official vote counts, in his words, "to foreclose the possibility of finagling with the returns."

Among the most cited exit polls were those conducted by Mitofsky International, whose founder, Warren Mitofsky, is widely credited with having invented exit polling. Zogby, whose firm was not among those that provided network TV coverage of the Nov. 2 election, described the possibility of either incompetence or fraud causing the controversial deviation as "impossible."

According to Zogby, it would have required "wrong sampling in wrong areas throughout the country," or the purposeful manipulation of data to obtain exit poll results so significantly different from the official totals. He viewed neither as a possibility.

When asked what exactly had happened then, Zogby replied, "a problem, but I don't know where it is ... something's wrong here, though."

On Nov. 5, Nader requested a hand recount of New Hampshire ballots, subsequently telling IPS he had "reports of irregularities there, and we have the cooperation of the state government ... the state attorney-general and secretary of state."

Nader also said his headquarters had been flooded with requests for assistance from a number of states.

On Thursday, five of the 11 New Hampshire voting wards where Nader requested a recount will undertake new tallies. According to his staff, all 11 wards had their votes counted with optical scan machines, primarily the AccuVote models made by Diebold.

"If there are irregularities, it may have broader applications in other states," Nader said, adding that the current recount -- a 45,000-vote sample -- is expected to be completed within a week.

Allegations regarding optical scan machines' potentially allowing the manipulation of Florida's vote have been widely reported. In Ohio, the Green and Libertarian parties are pursuing a recount, numerous instances of voting irregularities having been reported there.

"As far as I'm concerned, this election was clearly stolen. What they did in Ohio was systematically deny thousands of African Americans, and other suspected Democrats, the vote," charged progressive author, commentator and activist Harvey Wasserman of Franklin County, Ohio.

"It was like Mississippi in the fifties, and it was deliberate ... had there been enough (voting) machines, and had people equal access to the polls with a reliable vote count, there is no doubt that John Kerry would have carried Ohio," he told IPS.

The Nov. 14 'Cleveland Plain Dealer', one of the country's top 50 broadsheets, reported a Nov. 13 voter hearing where: "For three hours, burdened voters, one after another, offered sworn testimony about election day voter suppression and irregularities that they believe are threatening democracy."

"People are deeply concerned that this is the end of American democracy, that we cannot get a fair election," Wasserman said, poignantly adding, "there was no question of apathy in this election -- we had more volunteers than could be used ... thousands and thousands of grass-roots volunteers."

If Kerry had taken Ohio, he would have taken the presidency.

"In the end, what Nader is doing in New Hampshire is the best answer. And if there's a recount in Ohio," that is also important, said Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist who specializes in statistical methods, elections and public opinion.

Somewhat concerned about the possible manipulation of e-voting machines, Franklin was more concerned over "the ordinary administration of elections," citing the simple logistical problems that had plagued voters.

He pointedly noted that the last two presidential elections highlighted "how the decisions of local people (officials) ... can have a considerable influence over who gets to vote, what rules govern."

When asked if he was aware of any parallels to the present election, Zogby replied, "I'm certainly aware of the election of 1960."

"It's been discussed, overtly, the roll that Richard Daley, and the roll that Lyndon Johnson played, separately," Zogby said, referring to an episode where the John F Kennedy campaign had supposedly asked, "How many votes do you have?", the reply allegedly being, "How many votes do you need?"

Of course, such examples also serve to highlight the influence "local people" can exert on an election's outcome.

In the end, many people speculated that the 1960 incidents were not part of a grand conspiracy per se, but the cumulative effects of the actions of a number of individuals who shared a similar perspective, acted semi-independently, and did whatever it took to win.

Political "dirty tricks" culminated in the Watergate scandal, forcing then President Richard Nixon (1969-1974) to resign, ushering in a long era without similar illicit activity, until questions raised by the election of 2000.

With American democracy, until now, providing an effective model for many, as Zogby said, "we're talking about the Free World here."

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Reward for proof of serious voting fraud raised to $200,000

By John Byrne | RAW STORY Editor

A non-profit music advocacy group has raised their reward to anyone with evidence of voting fraud that could change the outcome of the presidential race to $200,000, RAW STORY has learned.

The group, Justice Through Music, said that one of their major donors from Ohio had agreed to front the first $100,000 for the award; they are now raising donations to increase the reward through PayPal. Ohio was the battleground state that decided the 2004 election.

They are offering “at least a $200,000 reward to any person or persons who provide conclusive and verifiable evidence that the results of the 2004 presidential election were not correctly tabulated” if it would affect the electoral outcome.

“Mainly we’re looking for whistleblowers, insiders, stuff like that,” media director and photographer Shahzad Rauf said.

Rauf stressed that the group is hoping to increase the size of the award, so that if someone loses their job by reporting anything, they would have something to live on for a fair amount of time.

“I’m asking some of the bloggers to donate too,” he said. “I think if we could get it up to a million, it’s a better incentive.”

If anything, Rauf says he hopes the reward will give life to the movement questioning the security of the nation’s voting systems and the myriad cases of erroneous vote tabulations. No evidence of deliberate fraud has surfaced beyond statistical analyses, though there have been numerous reports in Ohio of machines giving out wrong totals.

In a Columbus suburb, nearly 4,000 votes were erroneously tallied for Bush, though they were not cast by actual voters.

Electronic machines malfunctioned in Mahoning and Mercer Counties; the machines had to be reset. At one point showed votes of “negative 25 million,” according to the head of the local board of elections. In Howard County, a judge ruled Election Day that everyone standing in line to vote at 7:30 p.m. had to eventually be allowed inside, but the Republican Secretary of State avoided the ruling by sending everyone home at 12 a.m., since the ruling only applied to Election Day.

In Warren County, officials said they had been told of a threat of terrorism, though the FBI denied any such threat.

Rauf called the reward “a way to get it out there without being involved in the big conspiracy theories.”

“I get so tired of that,” he added. “I tend to agree that the numbers look fishy and fuzzy, but I haven’t really seen any evidence.”

Awarding of the money will be considered by a five-member internal panel in February of 2005. In the event no one meets the criteria for the reward, they say all funds donated will be used to ensure future votes are verifiable through a paper trail.

Justice Through Music is a non-profit, 501©(3) organization that uses famous musicians and bands to organize, educate and activate young people about the importance of civil rights and voting.

One blog, Brad Blog, is keeping an archive of alleged voting fraud and evidence of voting irregularities at his site.

Reward for proof of serious voting fraud raised to $200,000

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waaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh!

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• November 18, 2004 | 9:30 a.m. ET

Scholars on the votes, Ohio undervotes (Keith Olbermann)

SECURE UNDISCLOSED LOCATION— We return to Academic Dueling In Our Time, already in progress.

A UC Berkeley sociology professor, director of his school’s Survey Research Center, is scheduled to conduct a news conference at 1 p.m. ET today at which his “research team” will report that “irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes” to President Bush in Florida.

The advance word of the news conference gives little detail, but suggests Professor Michael Hout might be treading out onto thin ice. His study is said to show “an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods.”

The Berkeley group may have new material, but if not, it could be pinioned by the fact that some of the apparent variations between optical scanning and other voting methods in Florida, might also be explained by— or, even better explained by— historical voting patterns in Florida’s Dixiecrat counties of the north, and the Panhandle.

Regardless, this is now shaping up as the BCS of presidential election analysis. A joint report out of the CalTech and MIT voting project— suggesting that the much-decried exit polling of election night really wasn’t outside the margin of error at all when analyzed on a state-by-state basis— had already been countered by a Penn professor’s report using the exit polling for Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Now it’s not just CalTech and MIT versus Penn— but also UC Berkeley versus CalTech and MIT.

Stay tuned for the halftime show.

And stay tuned for the latest disaster from Ohio.

For 40 years, the Dayton Daily News reports this morning, Shirley Wightman has worked at polling places on election days. Two weeks ago, she says, turnout was high - 611 voters - and she and her colleagues paid careful attention to their punch-card, chad-filled, voting stations in Washington Township, Ohio.

“We checked the machines periodically,” Ms. Wightman told the paper, “and I could see nothing wrong with them.”

Yet when the votes were tallied, 168 of the 611 voters had made no choice for president. Unless these were the famed undecideds we heard so much about in the closing weeks of the campaigns, something went terribly wrong. 27 and a half percent of the voters in that “Washington X” precinct in Montgomery County officially didn’t have a presidential preference.

This was the high point of the Daily News’ investigative analysis of the still-unofficial voting results in its county— or more properly, perhaps, the low point. The paper discovered that of the 284, 650 votes in Montgomery, a total of 5,693 registered no valid vote for president. And the percentages were significantly higher in the 231 precincts that wound up voting for Kerry (2.8%) than did the 354 that wound up voting for Bush (1.6%).

Besides Washington X, a second County precinct exceeded 27% ‘undercount,’ as the election professionals, such as they are, call it. Washington X, Kettering 3-A, and five of the other top ten ‘undercount’ precincts by percentage wound up supporting Bush.

Since, as the papers note, political scientists suggested that the poor and the lesser-educated are presumed to have more trouble with punch card voting, there are several logical disconnects here. Given the outcomes in those two precincts, Washington X and Kettering 3-A, were those mostly Bush voters who managed to blank out more than a quarter of their own ballots, or did the precincts wind up voting for Bush because more than a quarter of the ballots had no valid presidential vote?

What happened in the voting precincts in Moraine, Ohio? 2,557 votes were cast at seven sites there. The President won the city by 2%. The number of ballots without a valid presidential vote was 5.6%.

What do the state undercounts in Ohio look like? Did they reduce Bush’s margin of victory? Did they eliminate votes for Kerry? What the hell happened?

The least likely explanations are that these people couldn’t make up their minds, or screwed up only the presidential part of their ballots.

“It is very difficult to believe that a quarter of the people would not vote for president, especially in a year like this,” University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato— an old friend of Countdown— told the Daily News. “If I were the election officers in those areas I would be doing some very extensive checks of those machines.”

As the Ohio recount nears, the number of hotspots continues to multiply. You are aware of the remarkable late night voting lines throughout the state, and the mysterious Glitch of Youngstown which initially registered negative 25,000,000 votes. There is the Gahanna machine which gave one presidential candidate 4,000 extra votes in a community of 600. And the farcical “walling off” of the vote counting in Warren County, because the county head of security was told face-to-face of an FBI terrorism warning there - except the FBI says it didn’t issue any terrorism warnings there.

The Associated Press today carries a report of 2,600 ballots in nine precincts around Sandusky, Ohio that were counted twice— as that paper puts it— “likely because of worker error.” The Clyde precinct showed a voter turnout of 131%, to the dismay of the head of the elections board, Barb Tuckerman.

Ms. Tuckerman, in one of the great quotes of the election, told the News-Messenger of Fremont, Ohio: “I knew there was something amiss.”

Tell me about it, Barb.

What do you think? E-mail me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com
Scholars on the votes, Ohio undervotes

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Columbus, Ohio -- Election officials in one Ohio county found that about 2,600 ballots were double-counted, and two other counties have discovered possible cases of people voting twice in the presidential election.

Prosecutors were trying to determine Wednesday whether charges should be filed against a couple in Madison County accused of voting twice. In addition, Summit County election workers investigated possible double votes found under 18 names.

In the other case, Sandusky County election officials discovered that about 2,600 ballots from nine precincts were counted twice, likely because of worker error, elections director Barb Tuckerman said.

Tuckerman believes the votes were counted twice when they were mistakenly placed alongside a pile of uncounted ballots. The room where the ballots were being fed into optical-scan machines on election night was so crowded that ballots had to be placed on the floor, Tuckerman said.

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IIIIII was the first person on this board to speak of all of this! So, trust me, papa, when I say that I believe in everything I say.

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from papalovesmambo on 11/4/04:


got your attention? good.

well, this is probably the last thing you'd be expecting from me, and i have to admit that it's surprising me a little too. so, without further ado...

shut up.

both sides, shut up and take a f***ing breath.

to my friends on the left, you're letting yourselves get bent out of shape over rodney? rodney? please. and mimi and whatever this new westy is? that's like haranguing a piece of s*** because it's brown and stinks. i know they're vile and all that, but please, are they worth it?

to the those of you who i like on the right (and it's disturbingly few) after all this time did you think that the people who fought tooth and nail against the possibility of gw getting re-elected were just going to go away? duh, this election was monumental and while i disagree that the results will be as detrimental to both the country and so many of its people (especially a specific minority who hold a majority status here) as they believe, to just act like it's business as usual is callous and stupid. grow up.

to those a**holes who've come out of the woodwork to spew hatred, so you've been getting beat up on for a while because of your views. so what. deal with it. you've chosen to place yourself in an online community where for possibly the only times in your lives you are in fact the minority. this is what it feels like to see no one around you who shares your views. not a lot of fun, huh? you've chosen to be here. you made a choice to make yourself a minority. that's more than a f*** of a lot of the people upon whom you're spewing your bile have done. if you can't see how important this election was to so many people then you're too stupid to breathe. if you do see it and continue to squeal like little piggies at every single post that comes up which validates the sentiment that's been on display here for months, then you're beneath contempt. i like that phrase, beneath contempt.

people are scared. they have some justification for that fear, i will certainly allow. i don't think things will come to pass in the apocalyptic manner in which some of them prophecy. but if you can't see that or refuse to make allowances for that fear or worse deliberately prey upon that fear...what kind of person are you?

deal with the fact that there's anger and fear and that we, we, have to work through that to prove that the fear is while not unfounded, at least doesn't have the support necessary to achieve the goals attributed to it. we have to work together. people don't trust each other and so there has to be ways to find little bridges but it's not gonna happen the day after the election, or the week after the election or the month after the election. it's gonna be slow but it has to happen. we have to find ways to work together again, or we'll allow the idea of america to vanish.

now i've taken more s*** on this board than most any of you and for decidedly longer than most any of you who are among the wild eyed new conservatives. i was here before there was a f***ing off-topic board. i'll be here long after most of you useless attention whores have left. and i have a message for you:

quit trying to f*** up my board.

take a breath, folks. seriously.

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Updated On: 11/18/04 at 05:40 PM

Because when he is not being a jerk about politics, papa is actually a really great guy. He is fun to hang out with (in real time). And, he can be a super sweet guy. He just loves to provoke and is as passionate about his views as we are. He can't help it that he's wrong.

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the only approval I need from you is to kiss my a$$.

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