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.
Florida ping.
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?
There's just as much actual evidence to support that explanation as there is to support the explanation that the electronic voting machines were flawed in 2004 - i.e., none whatsoever. There is no reason to believe that one can simply treat 1996 or 2000 as some sort of control group, and evaluate 2004 in light of those results.
Well, my point was that the author seemed to take the view that the 2000 election was the control and any variation was to be attributed to fraud in 2004. If anything, I think it is more likely that the fraud occurred in 2000, but no reputable scientist can assume either.