Reply #5: The reports don't conflict. [View All]

They actually back each other up.

This is from an old email I dug up, though were I to write it today, I'd not attribute the research just to Kathy -- I believe Liddle did a good share of it and of course Ida was the originator.



The Berkeley study would appear at first glance to say the exact
opposite of what Dopp's study says. That is, the Berkeley study
indicates that e-voting added to Bush's total while Dopp's study
blames opscan for adding to Bush's total. If they were each comparing
one against the other, how could they both be correct, right?

Again, this is a matter of which counties were included, but this time
on the other end of the scale. Dopp excluded counties over 500K. The
Berkeley study says:

  The impact of e-voting was not uniform, however. Its impact was
  proportional to the Democratic support in the county, i.e., it was
  especially large in Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade. The evidence
  for this is the statistical significance of terms in our model that
  gauge the average impact of e-voting across Florida's 67 counties and
  statistical interaction effects that gauge its larger-than-average
  effect in counties where Vice President Gore did the best in 2000
  and slightly negative effect in the counties where Mr. Bush did the
  best in 2000.

...those three counties specifically were excluded from Dopp's analysis,
along with Pinellas and HillsBorough. That left Dopp with mostly those
counties that had more pro-Bush results.


As an aside: the fact that the pro-Bush e-vote counties showed a
"slightly negative" correlation is in the correct direction to support
Dopp's conjecture -- running with the "fraud" hypothesis here because it
is easier to word it that way: the baseline of the opscan ballot numbers
would have been raised above its nominal value if Dopp is right, which
means that if the medium sized, bush-voting e-vote counties were not
tampered with at all, that would make it look to the Berkeley researchers,
like those counties were below the expected "red shift."


...so the answer, like in Ohio, is that there were "pockets of" fraud. Many techniques were used in a rather uncoordinated fashion.