Berkeley Study Debunked

http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65896,00.html | 12/07/04

[traderrob6]

A study by Berkely grad students and a professor showing anomalies with electronic voting machines in Florida has been debunked by numerous academics who say the students used a faulty equation to reach their results and should have never released the study before getting it peer-reviewed

[traderrob6]

They were in too much of a hurry to get out the "good news"

[AxelPaulsenJr]

The study like their football team appears to be a little over rated.

[facedown]

Hot link

[dead]

Any link or actual story?

I think this is the study that the professor was updating almost hourly for the benefit of his audience over at DU.

That was his substitute for "peer review", and they consider him a serious scientist.

[Izzy Dunne]

It doesn't matter that the results were wrong - they made a good effort.

< /sarcasm >

[traderrob6]

Thanx for the link

[TexasGreg]

Regardless of the merits of the Berkeley study, Stewart said valid questions about the election results in Florida and elsewhere remain unanswered.

Yes, indeed, like why a significant number of democrats feel they have the right to vote 3 times (absentee, early, and provisional); or in 2 different states (New York and Florida); or in multiple counties (as in Ohio). But ... NO ... they won't look at that!!!!!

[Just Dan]

personal opinion....

I think that post was fine until the sarcasm tag

Its actually cool that college kids are challenging the election this way. Obviously there is a time to give it up, which these men and women fail to understand. However, An interest in government and politics is never a bad thing.

Rush to judgement? yes
Do they need to let it go? yes
did they make a good effort? yes

[traderrob6]

The far left wing "fishing for a result" NAAWWWW

[traderrob6]

As the article states. This was better as a class project/ discussion kind of thing. Not an academic paper

[rightwinggoth]

Is this 'Berkely" supposed to be UC Berkeley or the Berklee School of Music?

[Just Dan]

I read that part too. :-D

[Boundless]

They won't ever let this go. Here's another grasp,
promoting an alleged protoype as a deployed scam
(caution: barking moonbat site).

In sworn affidavit, programmer says he developed
vote-rigging prototype for Florida congressman;
Congressman’s office silent
http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=477

So far, the story only been picked up by an e-tabloid,
The Inquirer:
Programmer developed vote rigging code, claim
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20090

Frankly, dumping machine and electronic voting, and
using only mark-sense paper, would be fine with me,
and we might even get the Dems to agree.

[Wally_Kalbacken]

Pretty pure example of what Al Gore started in major league format - the politicization of science.

[GOP_1900AD]

It's Berkeley, not Berkely. (But in fact, it's unofficially Berserkely!)

[traderrob6]

Yea ,they have been in a tizzy over at DU on this. Even Bev Harris and Olberputz don't put much validity in that thing

[Atomicfever]

A once over on the article, makes me wonder if there was an evil Republican plot to put the brand new voting machines in counties that had a forcasted high Republican turn out...

Or maybe there was just a higher number of people who couldn't understand those new fangled voting machines, which was much more complex than a simple butterfly ballot, and more people pushed the wrong button this time...

[traderrob6]

Really....do we all remember who was pushing so hard for these "upgrades" in voting technology because the punch cards are so discriminatory...hmmmmm who was that again, OH yea, the Democrats

[The Electrician]

I had exchanged several emails with Professor Hout, taking him to task for not acknowledging that the anomalies revealed by his statistical analysis could be best explained by the strong likelihood that Democrats in Palm Beach, Dade, and Broward counties had inflated Gore's vote totals in 2000 through punched-card ballot fraud, and that the use of electronic voting machines in 2004 had forestalled that method of fraud, leading to an apparent surge in Bush votes over what his model had predicted for those counties. Instead, Hout's publically-reported comments talk about explanatory factors such as software or firmware errors in the electronic voting machines, and he left open the possibility that deliberate fraud (by voting machine manufacturers, perhaps) might have been involved, all of which are substantially less likely than the punched-card vote fraud explanation.

As expected, and as is evident from Hout's dismissal of the academic criticism (in the Wired article), Hout has refused to acknowledge any such possibility. It's evidence of a stunning lack of intellectual honesty, let alone a lack of intellectual curiosity on the part of a "professor", but evidently that's what is to be expected from a "Berkeley professor".

[Psycho_Bunny]

I was talking to one of these Conspirazoids the other day at lunch.  I shut her up by pointing out that (here in Washington) we overwhelmingly went for Kerry and sent Patty Murray back to the Senate but on the same ballots, apparently elected a Republican Governor.

Did the Evil Republics allow the Kerry and Murray votes to stand but were somehow able to magically defraud the governorship vote, or are there really "anomalies" in voting?