from
http://www.ceaselessagitation.org
A new study from Berkely has been posted that proves E-voting counties in FL which traditionally favor Dems had results skewed for Bush.
Summary:
http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/election04_Sum.pdf
Complete paper:
http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/index.html
Key sentence (remember Kerry lost FL by about 380,000 votes):
The researchers found that Bush received 72,000 extra votes in Broward County alone and as many as 130,000 extra votes across Florida.
AND
...if a voting machine was programmed to apply a vote for Kerry as a vote for Bush, the discrepency would be the total number of extra votes awarded Bush in addition to the same number of votes taken away from Kerry, which would then amount to 260,000.
Complete article in extended...
http://www.ceaselessagitation.org/
Study proves with 99.9% certainty that somebody altered the Florida vote count in favor of GW.
By Mike Cuenca | November 19, 2004
Even though the story broke on November 18, there's been little or no coverage by the mainstream media of the study from University of California sociologists, indicating the 99.9% likelihood that GW got a significant boost from deliberate fraud in the vote count after the November 2 election. Added to the growing number of indications that the presidential election results were manipulated, results of the study indicate that the increase in support for Bush was directly connected to whether or not a county used electronic voting, that the impact of the manipulation was proportional to the Democratic support of the county, and that the probability that this was due to chance is nearly null.
The study, now called the Hout Report, was conducted by Professor Michael Hout, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center, and a group of his sociology graduate students. The researchers utilized publicly-available data from CNN.com, the 2000 US Census, the Florida Department of State, and the Verified Voting Foundation.
In their summary of the study, the researchers wrote, "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," and that "We can be 99.9% sure that these effects are not attributable to chance."
In other words, somebody definitely monkeyed with the results and the monkeying favored Bush.
Even more telling is the fact that the results were more likely to have been skewed for Bush in those counties that had higher Democratic support, such as Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade.
What remains uncertain, though, is how many extra votes were attributed to Bush via this fraud. The researchers found that Bush received 72,000 extra votes in Broward County alone and as many as 130,000 extra votes across Florida. The uncertainty about the true number of fraudulent votes arises because the researchers can't determine the method or methods used by those who hacked the electronic vote count. For instance, if a voting machine was programmed to give Bush extra votes in addition to the true number, then the number of fraudulent votes would be 130,000. But if a voting machine was programmed to apply a vote for Kerry as a vote for Bush, the discrepency would be the total number of extra votes awarded Bush in addition to the same number of votes taken away from Kerry, which would then amount to 260,000.
And in the case that machines were programmed to actually dump votes for Kerry through some other method, such as programming machines to count backward after reaching a certain number, (which apparently occurred in a least one county,) the number of votes for Kerry may have been much higher than the sociologists' estimates. The sociologists mentioned this possibility, but did not conduct an analysis of its impact.
The sociologists utilized a multiple-regression analysis, which is a standard statistical technique used by sociologists and physical scientists to discern a pattern or result when multiple variables are applied. Hout and his team of researchers analyzed election data, demographic data, and voting-maching data. As variables, they applied the number of voters, their median income, the Hispanic population, the change in voter turnout between 2000 and 2004, the level of support for President Bush in the 2000 election, and the support for Bob Dole in the 1996 election.
The Florida Department of State certified the election results with a gap of 380,978 votes between Bush and John Kerry. If it's true that GW got at least 260,000 extra votes, that gap would have been only 120,978. And even that gap may have been fraudulently swollen by other methods used in addition to hacking the electronic voting machines, that would not have been accounted for in this study.
The results of this study cast serious doubt on the integrity of those results, especially when combined with other reported problems, such as errant results from computer-counted optical scan ballots, votes counted twice, voting machines that began counting backwards after reaching a certain threshold number of votes, and the discovery of official poll tapes in the garbage in Volusia County. The study is one more significant indication that the Republicans used their control over the vote-counting process to retain the presidency, if not other elected offices, as well.
What can we do about it? Are we stuck with the results? We likely will be unless there's widespread public outrage. If those who perpetrated this crime against democracy are not held accountable and the results invalidated, we can be sure that they'll continue to use these tactics until they are required to pay a steep price.
There is no democracy, there is no hope for democracy, if the vote count is rigged.
The study is posted at http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/index.html