UC Berkeley prof proves Bush stole election!!!

University of California at Berkeley ^ | 11/18/2004 | Michael Hout

[ArcLight]

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.

[ThePythonicCow]

Open source would invite fraud and could be easily manipulated.

It actually works the other way. Closed source invites distrust and hidden fraud. Open source invites more eyes, resulting in more robust software that is harder to hack.

[ThePythonicCow]

Forty posts later one person reads the paper

Some of what Torie saw in the paper differs from what I saw. The first part of what Torie writes of the article I agree with. But then he writes:

The counties are not listed, so I don't know if there is another logical explanation.

They list all the Florida (and Ohio) counties, with individual stats, in the data appendices, county by county.

From http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/index.html:

VOTE, 2004
• Working Paper: The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections
  by Michael Hout, Laura Mangels, Jennifer Carlson, and Rachel Best
  Summary of findings
  DATA
  Variable Descriptions
  Election Data - delimited text file
  Election Data - Excel file
  Election Data - stata file
  Election Data - SPSS file

Torie also wrote:

The study did not also consider that maybe the electronic voting counties had more population growth than the state as a whole from 2000 to 2004.

I disagree. In the above data, they account for the change in each counties size.

Torie wrote:

The correlation could also be random noise.

The correlation they find has a rather remote chance of being random.

There really does seem to be something that caused Bush to make greater gains in Broward and Palm Beach, as a percentage of the votes cast, then he made in the other Florida counties.

The only serious weakness I see in the paper is that it completely misses the alternative hypothesis, that the e-voting machines suppressed 'Rat fraud with paper ballots, rather than increasing Republican fraud using e-voting machines.

[secretagent]

Voting reform is not a partisan issue.

agree.

[Torie]

Thanks for your post. You make some good and interesting points, and the counties are listed in the data files I see. You will note that in model 2, whatever that is, there is no significant T stat, as the authors admit. I played with the excel file. Of the 13 counties with Etouch, Bush gained 2.4% over 2000, on average. Of the balance of 54 counties, Bush gained 4.1% on average.

Apparently what the authors did was flog the data, by more heavily weighting size. And do you have a comment to my post number 101, where the authors admit that there was a negative correlation with the manufacture of votes for Bush via etouch in counties where Bush did his best in 2000? So what we have on net, is the authors weighting for size, and thus apparently claiming that size had something to do with the etouch miscounting or some odd statistical anomaly, and then admitting that that only where there were lots of Gore voters, did the correlation pop up. Isn't a better explanation that something was going on in the Dem belt in Broward, Palm Beach and Dade (namely Jewish voters), and maybe a slight tendency for counties to regress to the mean because the play of issues cut less than in 2000 by geography?

If you just look at the excel spread sheet, you will see that the whole thing does not pass the smell test. Just excise the non etouch high population counties Duval and Orange from the data base, and I suspect you will see the T stat drop down towards nothing.

Oh yes, and the thesis that Gore stole votes last time, and Kerry didn't this time, I find absurd.

[jdogbearhunter]

[Torie]

Florida ping.

[Burlem]

lol, this is the professor and his girl friend right?

[Torie]

Oh yes, one other thing. The average Bush percentage gain in Dade, Broward and Palm Beach was 2%, the lowest percentage gain of all. Odd. The percentage is, granted, dragged down by Dade, where Cubans tended to abandon Bush vis a vis 2000. But Palm Beach and Broward still have a lower percentage gain for Bush than his average in the non etouch counties.

[Luis Gonzalez]

Dear Professor a%%hole,

More people voted in 2004 than in 2000, more people voted for George Bush in 2004 than in 2000.

As a result, President Bush beat that Stan Laurel looking guy who ran against him.

You may go back to watching reruns of Dobie Gillis now.

Luis

[Luis Gonzalez]

"The percentage is, granted, dragged down by Dade, where Cubans tended to abandon Bush vis a vis 2000."

Et tu, Torie?

[Natural Law]

The Democrat Truman said "There are lies, damn lies and statistics."

[Luis Gonzalez]

[Torie]

Facts are facts, but it would be good to examine some high density Cuban precincts to verify. That's you assignment Luis.

[Luis Gonzalez]

I just can't seem to correlate a 70% vote for Bush with the word "abandoned."

[Torie]

I said relative to 2000. It is a delta function thingie Luis.

[ThePythonicCow]

Oh yes, and the thesis that Gore stole votes last time, and Kerry didn't this time, I find absurd.

I don't have the time, given my limited skills with spreadsheets, to load the data as you did and see how it looks to me. So I will have to let stand your analysis there. Thanks.

I didn't say flatly that Gore stole and Kerry didn't. I did support the thesis that in a couple of the big counties, Gore stole a big bunch last time, by double punching tens of thousands of ballots, causing overvotes for anyone in that set of ballots who had voted Bush. No doubt there was, and remains, various other forms of thievery going on.

From my initial glance at the numbers, this might apply to Broward and Palm Beach (apparently not to Miami-Dade, as Bush didn't gain there this time).

Why do you find that absurd?

[Torie]

It is absurd because there is nothing to support it, statistically or otherwise. The swing to Bush in Palm Beach and Broward was close to the statewide average, and that frankly surprises me, since nationally, Bush gained 6% amoung Jewish voters, which was double the average swing, somewhat less vis a vis the Florida swing, but still more. Bush underperformed in short in Palm Beach and Broward, all things being equal, given the high Jewish population.

[ThePythonicCow]

Dade, where Cubans tended to abandon Bush vis a vis 2000

Good point. The Elian Gonzales affair was a particularly good motivator of the Cuban vote for Bush in 2000.

[ThePythonicCow]

It is absurd because there is nothing to support it, statistically or otherwise.

The case for it was made in the following FreeRepublic post on Nov 15, 2000: "Explicit statistical evidence of massive ballot tampering in Palm Beach, Fl" and reposted Jan 9, 2004: "Explicit statistical evidence of massive ballot tampering in Palm Beach, Fl".

Bush underperformed in short in Palm Beach and Broward, all things being equal, given the high Jewish population.

From what I can tell from my scratchings on the back of an old piece of paper, the above ballot tampering does not account for all, or even most, of Bush's under performance in Broward and Palm Beach. Your observation on the high Jewish population there might well explain the majority of the shift.

Did Bush get less Jewish vote than Gore/Lieberman? I would believe it if so, though given that Lierberman was Jewish, and Bush has been especially friendly to Israel, it sure would suggest that I don't understand the Jewish way of thinking if such were so.

[DBeers]

If anything should have federal standards (to ensure openness, consistency and verifiability) voting should. Why isn't everyone demanding higher voting standards?

Maybe because Republicans understand the Constitution regarding the State Legislature's role governing the selection of the Executive!

Pray tell -do you suggest it be otherwise?