FL Experts, Please post your thoughts.

I haven't heard this discussed much lately but there were 2 studies of FL votin' anomalies in the 2004 election:
1. Kathy Dopp's and
2. Berkeley's

The first showed that counties that used Op Scans disproportionately favored Bush, while the latter showed something similar for Touch Screen/DREs.

I have not had time to reconcile these two apparently conflicting reports, both of which were produced with statistical rigor.

Is it that TS/DREs favored Bush in South FL, while the Op Scans favored Bush in North FL, or WHAT?

I'd appreciate any thoughts on this as we continue our push for paper ballots. And yes, I know that all Diebold machines can be programmed and tabulated via GEMS, but FL is not all Diebold.

Have the citizen recounts in FL turned up anything that might point to problems with the Op Scans that Ms. Dopp has highlighted statistically? I'd assume the TS recounts would be waste of time since there's no voter-verified paper trail.

So what's the deal?

Remember, Kerry could have won the Presidency in FL or OH. We need to give them equal time!

I'm stunned that there's so much undercurrent, but meetings (Move On, etc.) seem to want to fix the future, not get to the bottom of the last election. There is no way that Castor voters voted for Bush as reported in Clearwater, St. Petersburg, etc., and many of my buddies simply don't believe that Pinellas County had such a big turnout for Bush and Martinez.

The school tax referendum was passed overwhelmingly - a clear democratic win in a union supported vote. Castor was the clear favorite in a county with a small Hispanic vote and a branch of the University of South Florida that was very supportive of her. The number of people who voted for Castor NOT VOTING for anyone is nuts...and how could someone vote for Castor (a state Democratic Education Commissioner and Peace Corps volunteer) and switch to Bush? No way...

This county was hacked - there's no question in my mind - but how to prove it?

Well, is it Op Scan or Touch Screen? If it's Op Scan, see:
<http://www.recountflorida.com/> and start your own recount!

I was hoping for some updates about this in this thread.

It looks like you have paper ballots there, but the map on the site needs some work! Let us know if you find anything!

I had a touch screen...and I personally had a "disk/card" that failed and the machine had to be "reset". Meanwhile, my wife saw that she voted for Castor and the "review" changed her vote, so she had to argue loudly that she only wanted to vote for Castor and didn't understand what happened...I suspect it is a mess that can never be fixed. The poll watchers were about 101 years old and very confused.

i was a poll watcher in pinellas and i also did a test of the machines in dec dec 8th i believe and i had serious problems with the machines..but the people running the test the next day in st pete
times said everything went well..which was bs..and now those same people are pushing for "paper trails" i will have nothing to do with them..i feel we have infiltraitors here and i am fed up!!
no matter how many time i have sent them articles and talked to them about vvpb they say "trails" well "trails are worthless and so it seems are the people running the reform..i am sick to death of these fools!

and think its clear the big problems were in the big coastal touchscreen counties, like the U. of Calif. study said. I did a statistical study of all Florida counties based on similar data to the Calif. study and got similar results.
http://www.flcv.com/fla04EAS.html
Major inexplicable swings in big touchscreen counties, not consistent with past voting trends and party registraitons in recent years(or exit poll data).

There may also have been some significant swings in the North Florida
small county dixiecrat counties, but rigorous statistical studies didn't show major problems if you assume that the 2000 election results for those counties was not problematic(not a solid assumption but its what we have). There was no solid evidence when compared to 2000 results of a major problme in those counties. But there were known problems in 2000 also, so there could have been signif. problems there too. There were recounts conducted by Miami Herald in 3 of those counties, but the results were strange and inconclusive. Miami Herald said they indicated not much problem, but if you look at the actual recount results there are some indications otherwise. They completed 2 counties, and they were small but one had a significant increase in Kerry percent-
0.3% which does a good bit if extrapolated statewide. And in the biggest they inexplacably stopped the recount before being finished, but looking at the results it appears possible for a much larger Kerry pickup than the other counties(Suwannee County). Too bad they didn't finish it. They haven't released enough details to figure out which side it supports.

But I've done a large analysis of most counties with documented major election problems, and found widespread touchscreen switching in most of the big touch screen counties; the most was in Broward, Palm Beach, and Dade; but they also have major systematic dirty tricks and malfeasance/misfeasance and manipulation to reduce minority and student votes, which were heavily Dem. So the evidence of fraud and dirty tricks and manipulation support the results from my statistical study and the Calif. study that the big swings were in the big touch screen counties; adding Hillsboro and Pinellas and a couple more; with big problems of different natures in other big counties like Orange and Duval. Based on the huge paper trail provided by the EIRS hotline irregularity reports, along with the EP hearings and irregularity reports to Common Cause and the County S.O.Es; there is support that the swing from known problems appears to have been enough to swing the Florida election.

http://www.flcv.com/fraudpat.html
http://www.flcv.com/summary.html
http://www.flcv.com/browardo.html
http://www.flcv.com/palmbeao.html
http://www.flcv.com/dadeo.html
http://www.flcv.com/EIRSFla2.html
http://www.flcv.com/studentv.html

Bush/Castor anomalies a day or two after the election. There is just no way that thousands of people in Pinellas voted for Bush AND Castor.

http://www.votersunite.org/info/content/mess-up_121304.asp

http://www.votersunite.org/info/content/mess-up_121204.asp

http://www.votersunite.org/info/content/mess-up_112304.asp

http://www.votersunite.org/info/content/mess-up_111804.asp

http://www.votersunite.org/info/content/mess-up_111404.asp


http://www.votersunite.org/info/messupsbyvendor.asp


Florida Machine Incidences:

https://voteprotect.org/index.php?display=EIRMapState&tab=ALL&state=Florida&cat=02&start_time=&start_date=&end_time=&end_date=&search=&go=Apply+filter


And Berniew1's site:

http://www.flcv.com/votefrau.html

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.

to rule out the effect of population which Dopp's debunkers had suggested. That was good.

But see this page:
<http://ustogether.org/election04/mitteldorf/Liddle.htm>
and look at the 2000 results. Similar even though the technology was different then. What do you think of this?

I was unaware of Ida's role in this, BTW. I thought she was "Ms. New Hampshire."

We can't really say since we have the Clint Curtis thing still hanging from the rafters. But whether there was fraud in 2000 or not, the 2004 results diverged moreso than the 2000 results. The graph is interesting in that it suggests that certain counties were targeted. It would be more useful if it also showed which of those counties had the new technology that early.

(EDIT to add: You're right I think -- Ida may not have touched on FL just my bad memory)

because the ballots should be available through the Florida Sunshine law. Has anyone tried going to those counties and actually checking them?

a suspicious evolution.

I did a spreadsheet just after the election showing the evolution by county since '96. Many of the Republican counties swung 30% in two elections about 15% in each. This was just to uniform with most of the counties following the same pattern. (I can dig up a copy, if someone is interested)

I've got a gut feeling that this was manufactured by Jeb Bush - a sort of electoral mirage to make the Bush swing look credible with 2000 Florida serving as a testing ground for the 2004 election.

Look at Volusia county in 2000 and again with the Bev Harris discoveries this election.

I do wish that some Florida folks would do a full recount in selected precincts to see if the ballots check out. A couple of convictions would do a lot more for election transparency than new laws, when the one's that are already on the books aren't respected.

Also check out the results of individual machines (logs). I believe you'll find machines side by side with widely varying results.

What's up in West Palm Beach, now that Anderson is Supervisor of elections?

The effort seems to have stalled. Too much sunshine down there I guess. And too much traffic too!