Unofficial Audit of NC Election: Comprehensive Case for Fraud

Sorry for the numbers. This is a long and comprehensive report, so please stay with me -- it offers what I believe to be a strong case that election tampering took place, and I want to carefully establish the facts. I think it may be the first deep examination inside the numbers of a given state -- not just speculation -- but real data collection and questionable results put to the test.

BeFree asked me a few days ago to look over the North Carolina election returns. Things looked funny. They were way out of sync with the exit polls and no one could believe that Erskine Bowles had lost in the Senate race. The deeper I looked at the figures, the more things began to look disturbing. I downloaded the precinct data and began to pour through it for clues. Then I saw that the absentee vote (which apparently also includes the early voting data) was huge, comprising more than *a million votes* and nearly a full third of the total vote (30%). It offered the chance to compare an unadulterated voting pattern against the strange results of election day. I reasoned with an early vote that large, it is no longer a sample but a benchmark. The nearer one approaches 100%, the more accurate the picture of the whole. At one third, any inconsistencies should even out -- even if more white suburban Republicans voted by absentee (as has been charged in the past with smaller samples) or if the Democratic GOTV pushed our early numbers (as has been assumed for this election). In that respect, I was lucky to have looked at North Carolina -- it's not as crazed as the battleground states and the electorate is nicely split between parties. Any inconsistencies of one side dominating the early vote would have showed up in the data -- they didn't.

With that in mind, I began an informal review of the NC absentee vote. What I found was stunning, and I believe it should have national implications. I have little doubt that we will find the same thing elsewhere by using benchmark absentee data against election day returns. It not only reflects the pattern of exit poll discrepancy we saw throughout the country, but it also makes a compelling case for purposeful tampering with the electronic data. I also think it reveals the three objectives of the Bush re-election campaign: 1) re-election 2) mandate 3) strong Senate majority.

All of the absentee information was buried in the precinct data, hundreds of thousands of lines worth, and had to be pulled out before a comparison could be made. Before we look inside the numbers, note that of the 102 North Carolina counties, 2 have not yet posted absentee data, Catawba and Lee. It may well be in the precinct data but mislabeled or combined in some way. The NC Board of Elections said that both counties have reported, but weren't sure where it was recorded -- I'm awaiting a call back with the information. My estimate based on Catawba's demographic similarity to Davidson would shift the absentee percentages by 0.6% in the Republican's favor, so bear in mind that I've not incorporated it into the data and the consistency is going to be even better than represented. Catawba has a strong Republican base (47,923 to 33,024 registered Republicans to Democrats) and is heavily White (91,141 white to 7619 black registrants). As it is now, the absentee/early vote is almost precisely balanced statistically with the final results. Lee county is much smaller and has 16,391 Democrats to 9149 Republicans (again mostly white) -- it likely would have little impact on the percentages.

Now, here is the absentee data for all the statewide offices, followed by the overall vote, and then the poll-only results (obtained by subtracting the absentee data from the overall figures). The poll-only data is important as it gives us an isolated snapshot of the results that were returned on election day.

GOVERNOR (Absentee)
Mike Easley (DEM): 573,120 (55.6%)
Patrick J. Ballantine (REP): 445,505 (43.2%) -12.4
Other: 12,490 (1.2%)

GOVERNOR (Overall)
Mike Easley (DEM): 1,939,137 (55.6%)
Patrick J. Ballantine (REP): 1,495,032 (42.9%) -12.7
Other: 52,512 (1.5%)

GOVERNOR (Poll only)
Mike Easley (DEM): 1,366,017 (55.6%)
Patrick J. Ballantine (REP): 1,049,527 (42.7%) -12.9
Other: 40,022 (1.6%)

Already we notice that the Democrat, Easley, ran consistently at 55.6% at the polls, in the absentee, and in the poll-only vote. The Republican, Ballantine, actually did very slightly better in the absentee. But this is the overall pattern of consistency in all the statewide races (except for Senate and President which I'll hold till last). There is one other important hidden benchmark we can measure here, percentage of turnout. Perhaps the Democrats had more early/absentee voters and the Republicans had a bigger election day turnout? Well, we can figure that by dividing Easley's absentees by his overall votes (573,120 divided by 1,939,137) to find a ratio of 30% for the Democrat. And then do the same for the Republican Ballantine to also get a ratio of 30%. Both Democrats and Republicans turned out in equal numbers in early voting and at the polls. Thank you, North Carolina.

To establish the point of consistency, here are the comparisons of all the other statewide races. It's a lot of numbers, most all of them in the same percentile range, but it was important to establish that there was a clear, obvious, and unaccounted diversion from the norm in both the Senate and Presidential races, so I spent a couple of twelve hour days and went through all the statewide numbers including the amendment votes.

MAJOR RACES

*******************
LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR (Absentee)
Beverly Eaves Perdue (DEM): 561,584 (55.7%)
Jim Snyder (REP): 433,112 (43.0%)
Other: 13,217 (1.3%)

LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR (Overall)
Beverly Eaves Perdue (DEM): 1,888,382 (55.6%)
Jim Snyder (REP): 1,453,711 (42.8%)
Other: 56,367 (1.6%)

LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR (Poll Only)
Beverly Eaves Perdue (DEM): 1,326,798 (55.5%)
Jim Snyder (REP): 1,020,599 (42.7%)
Other: 43,150 (1.8%)

*******************
SECRETARY OF STATE (Absentee)
Elaine F. Marshall (DEM): 575,045 (58.0%)
Jay Rao (REP): 416,145 (42.0%)

SECRETARY OF STATE (Overall)
Elaine F. Marshall (DEM): 1,911,570 (57.3%)
Jay Rao (REP) 1,423,115 (42.7%)

SECRETARY OF STATE (Poll Only)
Elaine F. Marshall (DEM): 1,336,525 (57.0%)
Jay Rao (REP): 1,006,970 (43.0%)

******************
ATTORNEY GENERAL (absentee)
Roy Cooper (DEM): 546,477 (56.7%)
Joe Knott (REP): 417,824 (43.3%)

ATTORNEY GENERAL (overall)
Roy Cooper (DEM): 1,869,699 (55.6%)
Joe Knott (REP): 1,493,061 (44.4%)


ATTORNEY GENERAL (poll-only)
Roy Cooper (DEM): 1,323,222 (55.2%)
Joe Knott (REP): 1,075,237 (44.8%)

******************

OTHER STATEWIDE RACES:


******************
AUDITOR (absentee)
Leslie Merritt (REP): 476,257 (48.6%)
Ralph Campbell (DEM): 503,250 (51.4%)

AUDITOR (overall)
Leslie Merritt (REP): 1,662,361 (50.4%)
Ralph Campbell (DEM): 1,633,622 (49.6%)

AUDITOR (poll-only)
Leslie Merritt (REP): 1,186,104 (51.2%)
Ralph Campbell (DEM): 1,130,372 (48.8%)

*********************
COMMISSIONER OF AGRICULTURE (absentee)
Steve Troxler (REP): 478,794 (48.6%)
Britt Cobb (DEM): 506,613 (51.4%)

COMMISSIONER OF AGRICULTURE (overall)
Steve Troxler (REP): 1,665,678 (50.04%)
Britt Cobb (DEM): 1,663,022 (49.96%)

COMMISSIONER OF AGRICULTURE (poll-only)
Steve Troxler (REP): 1,186,884 (50.7%)
Britt Cobb (DEM): 1,156,409 (49.3%)

**********************
COMMISSIONER OF INSURANCE (absentee)
Jim Long (DEM): 582,238 (58.4%)
C. Robert Brawley (REP): 414,204 (41.6%)

COMMISSIONER OF INSURANCE (overall)
Jim Long (DEM): 1,934,061 (57.6%)
C. Robert Brawley (REP): 1,421,404 (42.4%)

COMMISSIONER OF INSURANCE (poll only)
Jim Long (DEM): 1,351,823 (57.3%)
C. Robert Brawley (REP): 1,007,200 (42.7%)

**************************
COMMISSIONER OF LABOR (absentee)
Cherie Berry (REP): 475,570 (50.2%)
Wayne Goodwin (DEM): 472,632 (49.8%)

COMMISSIONER OF LABOR (overall)
Cherie Berry (REP): 1,721,841 (52.1%)
Wayne Goodwin (DEM): 1,582,253 (47.9%)

COMMISSIONER OF LABOR (poll only)
Cherie Berry (REP): 1,246,271 (52.9%)
Wayne Goodwin (DEM): 1,109,621 (47.1%)

***********************
SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION (absentee)
June S. Atkinson (DEM): 507,523 (51.7%)
Bill Fletcher (REP): 473,991 (48.3%)

SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION (overall)
June S. Atkinson (DEM): 1,656,092 (50.1%)
Bill Fletcher (REP): 1,646,838 (49.9%)

SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION (poll only)
June S. Atkinson (DEM): 1,148,569 (49.5%)
Bill Fletcher (REP): 1,172,847 (50.5%)

**************************
TREASURER (absentee)
Richard H. Moore (DEM): 546,160 (55.3%)
Edward A. Meyer (REP): 440,871 (44.7%)

TREASURER (overall)
Richard H. Moore (DEM): 1,812,182 (54.5%)
Edward A. Meyer (REP): 1,512,628 (45.5%)

TREASURER (poll only)
Richard H. Moore (DEM): 1,266,022 (54.2%)
Edward A. Meyer (REP): 1,071,757 (45.8%)

*******************************
NC Constitutional Amendment 1 (absentee)
FOR: 432,697 (51.7%)
AGAINST: 403,475 (48.3%)

NC Constitutional Amendment 1 (overall)
FOR: 1,494,789 (51.2%)
AGAINST: 1,423,195 (48.8%)

NC Constitutional Amendment 1 (poll only)
FOR: 1,062,092 (51.0%)
AGAINST: 1,019,720 (49.0%)

****************************
NC Constitutional Amendment 2 (absentee)
FOR: 679,434 (78.6%)
AGAINST: 185,101 (21.4%)

NC Constitutional Amendment 2 (overall)
FOR: 2,334,683 (78.0%)
AGAINST: 659,532 (22.0%)

NC Constitutional Amendment 2 (poll only)
FOR: 1,655,249 (77.7%)
AGAINST: 474,431 (22.3%)

****************************
NC Constitutional Amendment 3 (absentee)
FOR: 591,122 (68.7%)
AGAINST: 269,641 (31.3%)

NC Constitutional Amendment 3 (overall)
FOR: 1,984,151 (68.0%)
AGAINST: 933,021 (32.0%)

NC Constitutional Amendment 3 (poll only)
FOR: 1,393,029 (67.7%)
AGAINST: 663,380 (32.3%)

****************************

Of all the statewide races, the only other votes that may raise red flags are the Labor and Agriculture Commissioners, though likely the Catawba data will pull them into line. But none of the races showed anywhere near the unexplained swing of the Senate race.

*************************
SENATOR (absentee)
Richard Burr (REP): 492,166 49.48%
Erskine Bowles (DEM): 492,536 49.52% .04
Other: 9,917 1%

SENATOR (overall)
Richard Burr (REP): 1,791,460 51.6%
Erskine Bowles (DEM): 1,632,509 47.0% -4.6
Other: 48,103 1.4%

SENATOR (poll only)
Richard Burr (REP): 1,299,294 52.4%
Erskine Bowles (DEM): 1,139,973 46.0% -6.4
Others: 38,186 1.5%


*************************

WOW. With essentially the same vote demographics in the absentee and the poll, there was a sudden shift of 6.4% of the vote toward the Republican. That's more than a little alarming and is in itself enough to call into question the legitimacy of the election day vote. North Carolinians in this forum can speak to this, but Bowles is generally well liked. There is absolutely nothing to account for the bizarre drop of support in the electorate by 6.4% between the early voting (mostly the week prior) and election day. But when we compare it to the Presidential race, it is dwarfed by absurdity.

*************************
PRESIDENT (absentee)
George W. Bush: 529,755 52.9%
John F. Kerry: 469,522 46.9% -6.0
Others: 2749 0.2%

PRESIDENT (overall)
George W. Bush: 1,961,188 56.0%
John F. Kerry: 1,525,821 43.6% -12.4
Others: 13,989 0.4%

PRESIDENT (poll only)
George W. Bush: 1,431,433 57.3%
John F. Kerry: 1,056,299 42.3% -15.0
Others: 11,240 0.4%

**************************

So what the heck is going on here??? Kerry was behind by 6 points in the absentee/early voting. The result is consistent with the pre-election polls and most importantly with the exit polls of November 2nd. THE EXIT POLLS TELL US THAT PEOPLE VOTED IDENTICALLY TO THE OTHER THIRD OF THE ELECTORATE. By all standards of reason, the other two-thirds of the vote should be very close to the same result. But look at what happens -- a sudden and unexplained plummet in the very same electorate of NINE POINTS at the election day polls, more than doubling Kerry's overall margin of defeat. A 15 point edge for Bush in North Carolina on election day??? Come on -- I'm not that gullible. I honestly don't know how to account for that outside of computer programming -- and if it's there, there's a damn good case with the nationwide inconsistencies between exit polls and results on election day to say that it follows everywhere electronic tabulation goes. My gut tells me that this is why there is a reluctance in Florida and Ohio to push the absentee counting and that the ballots and counts had best be watched very damn closely. They present a paper trail challenge that if understood will provide a key benchmark for election day fraud. I also want to point out that the differential was not there prior to election day -- meaning there either had to be a *date specific* alteration in the software, a hack, or a specific activation just prior to the election. And lastly, it is not only the Presidential election day vote that is spurious -- the close Senate races also bear close scrutiny.

(Also posted to the NC Forum.)

this also includes early voting, though the early voting numbers were much higher in 2004.

Absentee Totals from 2000

Gore 187140 41.7%
Bush 258714 57.66%
Browne 1482
Buchanan 1061
McReynolds 303

Total 448700


These totals don't include curbside and provisional votes, which were relatively small figures.



Final overall totals:

Gore 1,257,692 43%
Bush 1,631,163 56%


http://www.sboe.state.nc.us/y2000elect/stateresults.htm

Thanks for the write up.

Several weeks leading up to the election, polls showed Burr and Bowles tied. Very very tied.

I expected this race to be the one that forced a huge recount. The spread was a bit shocking.

You're right. They were also tied in the absentee vote with a very tiny lead to Bowles. Statistically, it should have stayed that way, plus or minus a point. The 6.4 differential resulting entirely from Nov. 2nd moved so hard against the grain that it's cutting a jagged edge.

and how they correlate to the overall vote.

in fact, let's see how the absentee/early voting numbers match up with other states in this election. of course, we should pick states that aren't in dispute, but did have a significant number of early voters.

we also need to find absentee/early voting records...to what precinct their vote counted, and % of Dems and Reps.

We can't accurately check the precinct totals compared to past years because the early voting numbers were so huge and they are simply lumped in with the absentee ballots. Comparing precincts this year to precincts from 4 years ago gets you nowhere because the numbers are in large part much lower this year with so many early voters.

If you add up votes for various races, you see that the voter totals for state races are around 2.5 million. If you add up the amendments, the totals are approximately 2.8 million. If you add up the senate race in question, the total is about 3.3 million. The totals for the presidential election are around 3.5 million. Does somebody want to explain why there would be 40% more people turning out ONLY to vote for the presidential ticket that didn't vote for any state races (excluding senate and amendments)? Is this even possible with Diebold terminals (to vote for only a few of the offices and not all)?

Though it was likely to be close, I felt that Bowles would be a lock. With an the governors race a done deal and Kerry polling better than most thought he would, it seemed, despite the close Senate race numbers, that things would tend in Bowles' favor.

like a gun

whalerider55

Do you have any links to source your data for both vote results, and polls?

It's all downloadable here:

http://www.sboe.state.nc.us/enrs/main_primary.asp?ED=11xx02xx2004&EL=GENERAL&YR=2004&CR=U

Updates daily, so there's sometimes a slight shift in the numbers but not enough to throw off the percentages.

Data >> Get External Data >> Import Text File >> name of file >> Delimited >> next >> check off comma >> finish

I would never thought to have done that. Maybe it's worth doing with other states.

Believe me, there are dozens of reasons someone can come up to explain this pattern, but boy, does it scream for an investigation.

(I nominated this for the homepage, BTW.)

Can we get some coders on the job to get some automation for a similar analysis of any other data we can get hold of?

I can help, but I haven't compiled any data. Data obtained directly from the source would be best too, that way we could avoid any "transcription" errors that seem to be coming up on the web based data.

Can you run an analysis using Benford's law on the precinct data you have?

Burr beat Erskine Bowles! Never!

In talking to the BoE, can you determine what would trigger an election AUDIT? Have you provided the BoE and/or the Governors office with this? The Atty. General race is a critical one... we need some Dem Atty General that will PROSECUTE people who tamper with elections!!

And, as for the Auditors race....Campbell has been the Auditor in NC for ....well, forever. They've done a recount on that race, and Campbell lost in the recount. I'd like to see an AUDIT OF THE MACHINES!!

Someone needs to impound those damned machines and go over them with a fine-toothed comb.

Same for Ohio. It looks like people voting absentee and/or provisional ballots, may have been voting in more than one county. We have had NOTHING but gerrymandering from the republicans in this election -- from throwing away Dem registrations in GOTV efforts, to extremely strange race statistics for pres. and congress.

It's enough to make you want to SCREAM!! ...and throw things!


:kick::kick::kick:

The Elections people kept switching me around, putting me on hold, and finally I got a voice mail. I don't think they were intentionally being evasive. I have the impression they are spinning in a thousand directions. I'm not in NC, so it may be best for a native to push with the officials there.

I can. Hope other NC'linians will, too. Was at a meeting last night where the vote was being "spun" as "not much of a problem." This was a Dem wind up for those of us who worked on the ground...ACT/GOTV...it was pretty discouraging in that the people conducting it really didn't want to hear much about the "angst."

I'm more Lefty that most folks here, but our lefties are working on other things...so that's the good news.

Thanks for all your work...I'll pass it along to wherever it might do some real good.

I posted election night that "something is wrong in NC." Posted again after the election...funny numbers, but I can't do statistics it was my observation of watching the polls and being there on election day.

Two Precints are still outstanding...they wouldn't even give us the princinct names last night...it's as if no one knew, or they didn't want to talk about it. I'm a precinct co-chair, they should have shared the info..:-( I assume those twp pricincts are the ones the articles are coming out about today...you'd think we here would know.

Here's his email: don.wright@ncmail.net

and he said this - (6 of these machines were ES&S BTW. Since then I have been passing along the info on the non-human error and also sent him the four-lines (@ten words) of simple computer code that could have fixed the problem in Carteret.)
---------
There was a malfunction of a voting machine in Carteret County because the company technician failed to set the machine to handle a higher number of votes. It was a simple matter of pressing an additional switch. The other counties you refer to were counties that reported total incorrectly and later corrected the reporting, had a ballot error as to the placement of a candidate that was corrected prior to the election, or miscounted the first attempt absentee votes. All those matters were quickly corrected.

The counties you mentioned use a variety of voting systems, punch cards, optical scan paper ballot, and electronic machines that are used by 93 out of 100 NC counties. The seven remaining counties either use paper ballots that are deposited in a ballot box and must be hand counted or lever machines an obsolete technology that has not been manufactured in this country for decades. The point is, that voting systems and the reports of voting totals work as well as the persons who are manning the machines or producing the report. As with every election, human errors do occur, and we have and will continue to address each error as to causation, and whether procedures should change to help prevent future errors. As the high rate of highway accidents show, the human factor in technology is and will be the primary source of accidents and errors.

No state or county board anywhere in our country can guarantee you an election without human error, but we are committed to that goal. Please be assured that the human errors in the counties you name are corrected and actions taken as to them.
Don Wright
General Counsel


-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, November 09, 2004 11:30 PM
To: Don Wright
Subject: North Carolina deserves a re-vote

With more than ten counties reporting electronic voting machine "glitches" North Carolina deserves a revote. Reports are this would cost $3.5 million. Seems a small price to pay for hope. What is that - a buck a person?
If our votes have no validity we have no hope. And without hope, we have NO society. Please don't take our hope away.
----------article follows:
>>
In North Carolina, tens of thousands of votes were affected by multiple problems with electronic voting machines in Carteret, Mecklenburg, Craven, Guilford, Yadkin, Onslow, and Forsyth counties.

Election officials in these counties and with the North Carolina State Board of Election were warned repeatedly that these types of problems COULD and WOULD occur and they dismissed the warning<<
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/10133265.htm?1c

Posted on Tue, Nov. 09, 2004

And I'm originally from NC too. I moved a year ago.

Good work, ignatzmouse.

Folks, the absentee/early vote is the barometer, as ingnatzmouse says. If your state has not yet released their early/absentee find out why. Heck, now you know why, now it's just a question of applying the same logic to your state as ignatzmouse has done for NC.

Here in Ohio they haven't even counted the damn things yet!

I tried to pm you, but I can't...

My gut tells me that this is why there is a reluctance in Florida and Ohio to push the absentee counting and that the ballots and counts had best be watched very damn closely. They present a paper trail challenge that if understood will provide a key benchmark for election day fraud.

But then again, the early voters weren't subject to the 'missing explosives story' or the 'scary' OBL video. (I jest, just trying to find out ways for possible Rep spin)

This data is fascinating. Good work!

Thank you, ignatzmouse -- another DU star bursts into the dark sky.

Just magnificent -- precisely (IMO) the type of analysis that should be done everywhere.

Can you do any others? (Hate to be greedy, but....you yourself know how important this is.)


MEGA: :toast:

I'd be happy to look at any state where there is sufficient data for investigation. My eyes are going a little blurry and my ass is getting a little sore, but these are critical times that call for blurry eyes and sore asses. I think Jefferson said that...

As a Canadian looking in. It's work like this, by average citizens, that give hope to the world that Americans can and will free themselves from the tyranny that took over your country in 2000.

When are the police, FBI, or any other authorized body going to impound the machines?

I haven't looked at all of Colorado's Numbers yet but

Bush (R)........1,058,040.....Kerry (D).....944,052
Salazar (D).....1,023,803.....Coors (R).....944,520

does this look strange to anyone else?

Oh and good work btw!

Colorado is still a little to the right overall, and Bush won in 2000 as well. Salazer won the senatorial seat because Coors is a doofus and in local elections there was a backlash against the extremely conservative governor.

There might be things worth looking at in CO, but that difference for the presidential and senatorial races was completely expected.

that if you switched the names Bush and Kerry that the numbers would appear more consistent?

Bush winning the presidential race (albeit by less than the final margin), but Salazer winning the senatorial race. This alone is not suspicious. It's exactly what all polls were predicting before election day.

Thanks for the laugh!!

when i saw the returns last week almost spit at my tv -- BULLSHIT!

ballots? Actually one of the clues that the election was fraudulent early on for me, was that for a pres so unpopular without media coverage spin, the huge numbers of absentee ballots was favorable for Kerry, not the incumbent; as was the fact that voters often had to wait hours in abysmal weather conditins. B* doesn't inspire that kind of loyalty.

If other states are as high percentage wise as NC, and the same trends are followed, then it will reinforce the validity of the exit poll data, and a statistical analysis can be done on the differences between absentee and regular vote. Way suspicious.

BTW: I too nominated for front page (not sure if it takes more than 1 vote!)

Great work.

I did notice a trend favoring the Democrats in the absentee ballots. With Bush getting more support than anybody else in the state that is in the GOP, it doesn't surprise me to see the absentee ballots shake out that way.

I just don't know if what you have shown is too much of a bounce. I'd like to see some statistical analysis on these numbers.

Nice work.

A great argument to counter the increasing exit poll bashing

Thank you for all the time it must have taken you to compile all of that information.

From Charlotte Observer

Posted on Tue, Nov. 09, 2004

Glitch could force state to vote again

MICHELLE CROUCH

Staff Writer


More than 4,500 votes irretrievably lost in coastal Carteret County could trigger a new statewide election if the official margin of victory in two Council of State races is close enough, state election officials said Monday.

The problem, which one expert called one of the worst election glitches nationwide, occurred on a machine that wasn't set correctly.

"This is one of the few cases in which the votes were totally lost," said David Dill, founder of the Verified Voting foundation.

The votes, all early ballots, could affect the races for superintendent of public instruction and agriculture commissioner, both too close to call Monday.

Counties will add totals from as many as 75,000 provisional ballots to their returns today. If the final margin in any race is within 4,532 -- the number of lost votes in Carteret -- the losing candidate can file a protest with the N.C. State Board of Election.

It's unclear what would happen in that case. Attorneys Attorneys are studying whether the board could call a new election in Carteret County only, or even ask the disenfranchised voters to vote again. (Local elections officials have their names.)

But state law may not allow that: "The new election shall be held in the entire jurisdiction in which the original election was held," it says. That could mean the whole state.

Gary Bartlett, the state board's executive director, did not know Monday if the state has ever had to redo a statewide election; it hasn't happened in recent memory. A second election would cost between $2.5 million and $3.5 million, he said. <snip>

Your idea (apply the absentee voter returns as a "contol group" for comparison to election day returns from polling stations) is positively brilliant in its simplicity.

This thread merits elevation to homepage status.

Suggestion: a graphical presentation (as part of your analysis) would be very helpful.

You're very right. I don't know if I'm the best person to attempt a graphic on it, but the exit poll graphics that were posted earlier really did make the concept come alive. If someone wants to attempt this, I'd love to see it.

You've done a thorough job here and you have my gratitude. It's clear as day, something's rotten, very, very rotten.

I just downloaded the precinct results & don't see where they mark the ballots as absentee or not. Maybe I'm being stoopid, but how are you distinguishing absentee from poll? Do I have the wrong file?

No. It's there. You have to go line by line and pull it out. It lloks like this:

GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","AUDITOR","Ralph Campbell","DEM",38197,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000
GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","AUDITOR","Leslie Merritt","REP",34427,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000
GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","COMMISSIONER OF AGRICULTURE","Steve Troxler","REP",39334,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000
GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","COMMISSIONER OF AGRICULTURE","Britt Cobb","DEM",34810,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000
GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","COMMISSIONER OF INSURANCE","Jim Long","DEM",44992,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000
GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","COMMISSIONER OF INSURANCE","C. Robert Brawley","REP",29359,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000
GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","GOVERNOR","Patrick J. Ballantine","REP",31774,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000
GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","GOVERNOR","Mike Easley","DEM",44653,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000
GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","GOVERNOR","Barbara Howe","LIB",811,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000
GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR","Beverly Eaves Perdue","DEM",41728,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000
GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR","Jim Snyder","REP",32891,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000
GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR","Christopher Cole","LIB",869,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000
GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","NC Constitutional Amendment III","For"," ",44727,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000
GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","NC Constitutional Amendment III","Against"," ",20362,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000
GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","SECRETARY OF STATE","Elaine F. Marshall","DEM",43541,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000
GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","SECRETARY OF STATE","Jay Rao","REP",30109,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000
GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION","Bill Fletcher","REP",34406,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000
GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION","June S. Atkinson","DEM",38594,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000
GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","TREASURER","Edward A. Meyer","REP",32652,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000
GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","TREASURER","Richard H. Moore","DEM",40409,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000

These are some of the Absentees I compiled for Guilford County for instance. But that is a lot of cut and pasting to get to that point. Each County lists every single ballot race as a group with separate returns for every single precinct in the county. There might be a hundred precincts in a county to sift through before you find the ones marked "ABSENTEE" for a given race. They are usually at the top or the bottom of a given race, though, so you can pan to the start of "GOVERNOR" and if the absentees aren't there, pan to the bottom of "GOVERNOR."

thanks!

man, you did a LOT of work. My imac doesn't even want to handle that much info in one file--will hardly let me scroll thru it.

kudos to you...have you sent this to any media? AAR or Olbermann --?

Thanks for doing this! :yourock:

Those numbers are bizarre, to say the least.

and Welcome! Every voter deserves to have the points raised in this analysis answered with irrefutable proof. Faster than a speeding bullet-it's a 15 point swing - don't think so! :yourock:

spelling, spelling, spelling

tips@blackboxvoting.org

this also includes early voting, though the early voting numbers were much higher in 2004.

Absentee Totals from 2000

Gore 187140 41.7%
Bush 258714 57.66%
Browne 1482
Buchanan 1061
McReynolds 303

Total 448700


These totals don't include curbside and provisional votes, which were relatively small figures.



Final overall totals:

Gore 1,257,692 43%
Bush 1,631,163 56%


almost an exact match. this is interesting...

CONTACT ME HERE: I'm hopeful of an answer. They have answered me so far, at least: hammondmv@netzero.com

Rauf is the IT guy: bob.rauf@ncmail.net

Mr. Rauf: This appears to be an SAS program. This is merely an example of some of the online data.

Can you not easily pull out the details of the absentee ballots on a county basis as associated with each office?

thanks for your help.

marsha hammond,phd


GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","AUDITOR","Ralph Campbell","DEM",38197,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000
GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","AUDITOR","Leslie Merritt","REP",34427,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000
GUILFORD,"11/02/2004","A ","ABSENTEE ","COMMISSIONER OF AGRICULTURE","Steve Troxler","REP",39334,2004-11-11 03:30:13.560000000
GUILFORD,"11/02/

Communicate this information with Bev Harris ASAP!

This certainly looks like criminal fraud. I just checked: the NC AG is Roy Cooper, Democrat.

And it should also be sent to Cam Kerry. Thanks for the great work.

I just emailed the address of this thread to Keith Olberman. This needs to be publicized widely!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

Thanks for the welcome. :hi:

:yourock:

Have you contacted anybody with your findings? Keith Olbermann might be interested in your work. kolbermann@msnbc.com

Both Diebold and ES&S are used in NC (ES&S is just as suspicious as Diebold). It would be real interesting to see if all counties have this deviation from the absentee voting, or it varies depending on voting machines.

Here's a link for the voting equipment used in each county.

http://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/map.php?topic_string=5std&state=north%20carolina

Aren't the owners of both companies brothers?

See site for FLA discrepancies:

don't see it on your web page, passing lane

hammondmv@netzero.com

Has anyone sent this analysis to BBV or to friends in the media? I think calling it comprehensive case for fraud may be overstating things, but it sure looks odd.
Also is ignatzmouse credentialed? If ignatzmouse has a degree in math or statisitics, it would be more powerful.

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

:yourock:

I wonder what explanation they are going to throw on this? Everything else matches almost perfectly. But when it comes to THE TWO MAJOR RACES it clearly defies logic and tilts toward the Republicans!:mad:

Maybe when all the irregularities have proven our case of fraud; we can all chip in and buy everyone who has a sore ass a nice vacation!

if nc is a fraud then nevada and new mexico are a fraud..
then bush had his ass handed to him and rove worked his magic

Thank YOU!

This whole issue does not resolve around Florida's panhandle.

NC is on the map. Ohio is another state. Need I go on? Okay... NM, CA, and the list goes on.

Here is something recent on N.C.

N.C. Voting System Has Many Failures.

http://www.nynewsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-bungled-election,0,2793312.story?coll=sns-ap-nation-headlines

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

Wow! Really interesting stuff.

I thought it would be interesting to do a Benford's Law analysis of the election. It's a law regarding the first digits in natural sets of numbers that is used to find accounting & tax fraud. I've done an analysis of all the states. Here is the web page if you are interested:

http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~pagem/Benford/

M. Page
Dept. of Physics
UCSB

This is great work! Thank you for doing it. I read your whole article and read the graphs, but I don't understand what the conclusions are. I'm one of those right-brain dominant fine arts people. :dunce: Also the 2nd big chart on the main paper didn't post properly.

That one image should work now.

Benford's law is not used necessarily to prove fraud, but rather to "flag" suspicious looking numbers. So certainly some of the states match the law better than others. I now have a list of the most "suspicious" states, that is, the states that differ from the Law the most, available on the website.

This is the average amount (in standard deviation units) that the percentages from each state differ from theory. (I report in standard deviation units, to remove the effect of number of counties.)

The 12 "worst" states (Iowa being the worst of the worst):

PA 1.0369
MS 1.0552
IL 1.0702
KY 1.0735
MO 1.0853
MI 1.1072
GA 1.1562
IN 1.2083
VT 1.2400
TX 1.2482
ME 1.2600
IA 1.6296 (This state is WAY off - just look at the graphs too!)

I would like to do a similar analysis of NC, for both the absentee and regular ballots. But to do that I would need county-by-county totals of both the absentee and non-absentee votes. Does anyone know where I could get these?

I know I'm not surprised. I live here and the results that came out of here do not reflect what I've seen. I'd love to see someone dig into DeLay's results some day.

Nice job, gradstudent! Welcome to DU! :hi:

But I'm not good with reading this data. Could you explain what your results indicate?

If I understand the plots correctly, you just want the lines to be CLOSE. Close, of course, has some leeway -- the more counties (or data) the closer they should be. Connecticut and Massachusetts look pretty dead on. Others are just a mess!

Welcome to DU!1 :toast:

Also a .PNG Can you make it a gif or jpg?

THanks

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

you also said that it would not show ways of cheating that reflected randomness, like subtracting the numbers from one candidate and giving them to another, for instance.

I will post it if I can.

these standard deviation numbers

1. Depend on a state's performance related to the whole class of states, or does this measure each state's performance with regard to random probability?

2. Can you demonstrate the magnitude of the variations in a chart or graph, for example within the expected bell curve, or on a like chart?

This is really good stuff, and a great contribution to this part of the activity here. :thumbsup:

stfreema@sas.upenn.edu

here is his analysis: ooops. too tired. its on that 'buzz' URL web site.

can understand this! Great analysis and presentation.

This is some serious shit right here. This will raise the suspicions of even the most skeptical!!

Way to go!!!!

Get this to Conyers, the media, everyone!!!

Hi, joining late - I assume this has been forwarded already.. to Greg Palast, Tom Paine, Bob Fitrakis etc.

And it never hurts to send this stuff from numerous people. ;-)

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

I did the same with Cuyahoga County Ohio. All I have easily available are races for president, senator, and the gay marriage issue:

	        Kerry  Bush   Badnarik Peroutka 
Non-Absentee	65.6%	32.1%	0.3%	0.3%
Absentee	61.8%	34.4%	0.2%	0.2%

	     Fingerhut Voinovich 
Non-Absentee	47.3%	52.7%
Absentee	49.2%	50.8%

                Yes 	 No 	
Gay Marr Ban   52.6%	46.7%	
               52.7%	43.5%	

Don't know what to make of it -- just passing it on. Maybe I can do the local races Monday.

when I went to look for that kind of data on the Franklin county BOE website that was just there last week it was gone today. The SOS website doesn't have statewide statistics for Ohio which makes an analysis like this for statewide Ohio somewhat challenging to say the least!

I saw the same thing with North Carolina. Several of the decidedly Democratic counties produced a higher than expected count for Bush. I don't know what to make of it except perhaps not wanting to vote in line with the opposition. In the smaller samples of the past, the white suburban Republicans were more likely to use absentee and tended to skew the statistical merits of absentees as a predictor. Things average out, though, as the numbers increase as they did dramatically this year. The smaller sample size of county by county results can still vary a good deal, so one really needs the state's overall numbers.

To me, sample size is not the issue, since we're talking about the entire voting universe, not a sample of a larger group. There will definitely be variation, but the goal is to look for outliers.

If fraud was committed, it is likely to be localized, so that the absentee/poll-only comparison would match for most counties, but in some there would be outliers.

County-level data would make it possible to do a scatter graph showing the mismatch between absentee and poll-only data by geography. Areas in which there might be irregularities would stick out visually like a sore thumb.

The Rep counties voting for Bush is probably due to the Dixiecrats -- that's a very real effect. But the absentee/poll-only vote should match unless there's something funny going on.

If exit polls generally show 94% of Repubs voted Bush and 90% of Dems voted Kerry, with the Inds 50/50 -- then you can't run up those "dixicrat" pluralities in small counties here and in FL and OH without screwing up the turnout, or the final vote -- the turnout is known, the exit polls are consistent -- therefore, it is the count that must be wrong.

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

I analyzed after the early voting deadline but before the election the counts for Wake, Durham, Orange, Buncombe, Guilford, and Mecklenburg. In each county the % of Democrats casting early votes exceeded the percentage they make up of the total electorate, in other words Democrats were more likely to cast an early vote than Republicans. So it is not surprising at all that Kerry did much better among early voters than he did non election day, because Dems had tapped out the most driven part of their electorate. Durham and Orange were the highest % for Kerry overall, 68% and 67% respectively. In Orange and Durham counties, I believe half the total turnout was early voters. This helped skew the early voting turnout MUCH more Democratic than on election day.

So I think it not unexpected at all that there would be a wide divergence between how Kerry did among early voters and how he did on election day. In fact, it was to be expected

In my humble opinion your comment that:

"A 15 point edge for
Bush in North Carolina on election day??? Come on -- I'm not that gullible. I honestly don't know how to account for that outside of computer programming -- and if it's there, there's a damn good case with the nationwide inconsistencies between exit polls and results on election day to say that it follows everywhere electronic tabulation goes."
is not really supportable.

Yes, but the reverse happened in smaller counties throughout the state. Of course you will find more Democrats voting early in Democratic urban areas. You will also find more Republicans voting early in their strongholds and also actually in smaller Democratic counties. It averages out. At MOST there was a 1.8% early voting edge for Democrats as a percentage of their early vote. It's probably closer to 1.2% as there are more Democrats in North Carolina.

If we use the best case scenario for the Republicans of a close race, we can pretend that the field is even and check the early voting figures. It assumes that the electorate is 50/50 Republican/Democrat. The superintendent race was the closest, so I'll use that.

Atkinson, the Democrat, received 507,523 votes in early/absentees. Divide that by her total votes in the election 1,656,092 to find a ratio of 30.6%. Her early voting totals accounted for 30.6% of her total votes.

Fletcher, the Republican, received 473,991 votes in early/absentees. Divide that by his his total votes in the election 1,646,838 to find a ratio of 28.8%. His early voting totals accounted for 28.8% of his total votes.

So even assuming a 50/50 split of Republican/Democrat, the difference in early voting was just 1.8%. The best case for the Democrats is almost dead even at 30%. The mean between the extremes is 0.9%, meaning Democratic voters probably had roughly a 1% edge statewide in early voting. -1% to -2% does not translate into -15% in the presidential election day vote.

Common wisdom also says that absentee ballots favor Republicans, and these are included in the category he compares against votes cast at the polls. I would also make an assumption that there were more absentee ballots than early votes, though it's not supportable by any facts.

My point is that his category absentee/early voting is possibly not skewed like you suggest because it also includes absentee ballots.

or on provisional ballots...to have a paper trail. when i went to vote (totally democratic stronghold in northern california), several people (myself included) asked for provisional ballots.
absentee ballots may not have favored republicans this time.

a reasonable doubt here. This is as ironclad as it gets folks, yet we have a 2-post person suddenly showing up trying to cast doubt.

Absurd.

Oh, so since I have just discovered DU and have just made two posts, therefore I am a freeper? I guess I'll just go back in my cave.
I've been active in Democratic politics in NC for 36 years. I've run for office 4 times myself, twice successfully. I am NOT a freeper.

If I was a freeper why would I have picked a screen name that was actually my name (ger cohen IS my name) rather than just making up a fictional screen name like almost everyone else on DU? I'm not trying to hide who I am.

It's an abnormality in the data that has to be explained. Making claims beyond the data does not help the case.

IgnatzMouse had twenty-something posts when he started this thread, which is a more creative and thorough analysis and any long-timers on this board, including me.

It's very important that naysayers are NOT discouraged. One of the biggest dangers of the post-election period so far is that Democrats all over the map (including Greg Palast) are making unsupportable claims. They leak out to the national media, they are examined and correctly rejected, and all legitimate findings are dismissed. The WaPo article is a prime example.

Every finding should be tested. As Richard Feynman said, our goal should be to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible. The ones that can't be disproven are most likely the genuine ones.

It's the only way we an be sure that they are correct, and the only way that they can lead to any concrete evidence.

showed up after my post on there.

This poster's assertations are way off the mark, anyways. It is probably the same disruptor trying to go on every board and kill this story.

Karl Rove, is that you? :hi:

Not gonna kill this one.

No, I am not either Karl Rove, or a freeper. I am an active Democrat in North Carolina, have been so for 36 years. I simply do NOT believe that the mountain of statistics at the top of the post proves anything. I WILL say that the two weeks of early voting in North Carolina I worked for the Wake County Board of Elections at an early voting site (I got to hand my old friends John and Elizabeth Edwards their ballots in fact -- I've known Elizabeth Edwards since 1969 and went to law school with both John and Elizabeth.) Repeat, I am NOT a freeper. I am sorry that my analysis of the situation does not fit in with what people would like things to be.

you may want to check:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/14/13100/777
sure seems so very much to want to leave the present and speculate about the future.

as soon as you think a comprehensive update Diary on Bev Harris work should be posted at dKos just let me know and I'll do it for you if you determine it should be done before you can start posting your own diaries.

"It's about America" -- the one on life support and in need of immediate, heroic treatment: not more wishful thinking.

....suggest that you and Ignatz and others here post to this thread at dKos:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/14/144941/51

and, here is something interesting from a Federal, voter's rights perspective:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/14/153843/98#2

"Any inconsistencies of one side dominating the early vote would have showed up in the data -- they didn't."

"Perhaps the Democrats had more early/absentee voters and the Republicans had a bigger election day turnout? Well, we can figure that by dividing Easley's absentees by his overall votes (573,120 divided by 1,939,137) to find a ratio of 30% for the Democrat. And then do the same for the Republican Ballantine to also get a ratio of 30%. Both Democrats and Republicans turned out in equal numbers in early voting and at the polls."

Besides all of that, you completely miss the point. The absentee data perfectly predicted every single race and referendum except the senatorial and presidential races. If dems dominated the absentee data, all of these votes would've been skewed towards the dems. Instead, all of these votes were nearly identical to the final numbers.

Just because the author directly addressed this does NOT make his analysis correct

...with a concrete analysis of large samples of data from the entire state. Are you trying to say we should dismiss data that's coming from hundreds of thousands of voters because one person who says he was on the ground in one precinct reports a difference in the number of Kerry stickers he saw?

numbers are needed, and that is what makes this study so compelling. Someone over at Kos showed that large numbers of Kerry supporters voted early in a few dem leaning counties - see http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/13/164121/27 for more details

>>>>>

My theory is that the early democratic vote turnout - while may have been similar to republican - was from areas that are more friendly to K/E.. e.g. I suspect the turnout in Orange and Durham counties (dem. strongholdes 2:1 Kerry voters) turned out higher than other areas for the early absentee voting...

Actually my theory seems supported ...
In Orange county 2 to 1 kerry voters..

early absentee voting was more than 50% of the total votes cast.. in Orange County (chapel hill)

That could explain the results.... Dems from very friendly areas including Orange and Durham turned out much higher for early voting than dixiecrat or less liberal dems in the rest of the state.

>>>>>

I would like someone to calculate whether the early Kerry voters in these counties could actually account for the large discrepency between the Pres/Senate races and all the other races, which was so clearly illustrated in the study.

My own personal observation having worked at an early voting site in Wake County NC and on election day at the exact same location -- During the early voting, I counted 125 people wearing Kerry/Edwards buttons, hats, t-shirts, bumper stickers on their chest, whatever, compared with 6 such persons for Bush. Almost everyone with either Bush or Kerry stickers were white voters. The site went 70% for Kerry in the early voting

On election day, I was working outside the polls handing out Democratic stuff. I found a much larger concentration of hostile white voters who told me they were voting for Bush. Election day vote at that polling place, 59% for Kerry. So, a statistician looking at the election results say "same location, 11% swing to Bush, must be evidence of fraud". But my own anectdotal evidence? - there was a significant difference between the early vote type of voter and the election day type of voter, or maybe the OBL tape got to people (it was after Early voting ended)

It's okay. Questions are good. Individual counties can be all over the place because of the smaller sample size. Wake is fairly large, though, so let's look at their numbers -- again, roughly 1/3 was cast in the early vote.

Overall Wake County, NC:

Early/Absentee
Kerry: 51,899 52.9% +6
Bush: 45,974 46.9%

Election Day Polls
Kerry: 118,010 47.3% -5.4
Bush: 131,350 52.7%

Almost a complete juxtaposition, an 11.4 percent swing!

Also, as a guide here are Wake's numbers in the Governor's race. They are nearly the same, only around a 1.5% swing.

Absentee/Early:
Easley DEM: 59,926 60%
Ballantine REP: 38,180 39%
Howe LIB: 1,139 1%

Overall:
Easley DEM: 205,535 59%
Ballantine REP: 138,650 40%
Howe LIB: 5,357 1 %

Election Day Poll:
Easley DEM: 145,609 58%
Ballantine REP: 100,470 40%
Howe LIB: 4,218 2%

How does one account for the other 10% differential between the first 1/3 and the second 2/3 of the vote while the other races are the same?
Voting technology brought to you by: ES&S Optical scan

The author presents tons of data showing that statewide, there was no difference between the early voters and late voters. For numerous local races, state-wide races, and referendums, the early-vote results were right in line with the election day results. Despite this, there was a huge swing in the presidential race.

You present anecdotal information from one precinct. If your anecdotal evidence is true for the whole state--that early voting favored the dems--then why didn't all of the races show this? Why do the early and election day votes nearly identical patterns for ALL of the races other the presidential and senatorial races. Wouldn't a dem bias in early voting show up in all of the races?

Oh, and here is another anecdote -- there was a white woman taxi driver taking people to the poll where I was working on election day, the car was plastered with Bush stuff. She was telling her passengers to vote for Bush/Burr and then straight Democratic the rest of the way.

I asked her why? she said "Vietnam".

Repubs? Here in TN the early voters are usually senior citizens and they tend to vote for Repubs not against him.

the trend shift, if it was a legitimate one, should have been a boost for kerry, not *.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Although the results show the democrats winning the county the important thing to look at is that the democratic party lost 23.6% of it's expected vote to republicans. This is a heavy democratic county with 6726 registered democrats vs 1929 republicans and out of 9300 registered voters 7501 voted and of that total 6884 were by absentee ballott and early voting. Here is another odd stat when comparing the senate and presidential race in this county.

Martinez 976/Bush 1192 Early Voting Republican
Castor 1427/Kerry 1269 Early Voting Democrat

Martinez 425/Bush 515 Absentee (R)
Castor 567/Kerry 513 Absentee (D)

This is a op-scan precint and used Diebold Machines

I don't know how you analyze this info but hopefully it will help. I do have websites and info to back it up saved on hard drive.

other "listening" media sources.

M. Moore perhaps?

I expected the race to be much closer at the end with Kerry, and I thought Bowles might win it. I voted early, on Oct 21st, and there were about 5 people in front of me. When I came out of the voting booth there were at least 12 people in line to vote. The Democrats I know here were all very motivated, and I also know several people who voted for Bush the first time were voting for Kerry.
I'd like to see the breakdown by county also, and see this and it on a graph. I got laid off 2 days after the "election", and I like to play with charts and graphs so I'm going to see what I can come up with on these numbers.
Excellent Work and Many Thanks

:hi:

but I never heard ANYone say the converse. The only thing that could explain it to me is if *'s GOTV far exceeded the votes he lost. And that's hard to believe.

Welcome to DU!

:toast:

Thanks in advance for your work!

...that hasn't been mentioned is the "Sunday" effect. Specifically, the number of preachers who pretty much told their flocks how to vote on Tuesday.

I live in the NC mountains. Nearly every Dem I know who went to church on Sunday before the election was shaken up by what they heard.

While no pastor that I know of mentioned Bush and/or Burr by name, they pushed VERY hard that there were "certain values" every Christian should always vote for. Around here, folks understand those code words to mean bible-thumping Muslim-killing abortion-hating stem-cell-research-denying Republicans.

IgnatzMouse, your research is excellent and very compelling. I hope the numbers spur the North Carolina AG to action. However, having lived here for some time I think they could have pulled it off to some extent by leveraging Christian guilt and obedience.

I'm not sure if it applies here but I think it was the south.

The argument goes like this: there are many registered Democrats who have been long-time republican voters. They just never bothered to change their registration.


Cher

...I did a lot of phone-banking for Kerry in Western NC, and knocked on quite a few doors. By and large, the Dems in this area held. And I think more of them held for Kerry than did for Gore in '00.

That being said, I think the fundies were especially motivated to get * and Burr into office because of their great respect for life...the petty issues of favoring the death penalty and unjustified wars notwithstanding. :eyes:

Except Senate and President?

I'm quite new to DU but I'm impressed with what I've found.

Congratulations! This is excellent work.

as part of *'s 'faith-based intitiative' or otherwise? This is a serious issue that should also be explored!

Just looking at the Senate and Prez races, there is something odd in the pattern that Bowles voters went for Bush.

Fact:
- More people voted for prez than for the senate race. Those voters only went to polls to vote for the top of the ticket.

In early and absentee voting, those were 1.32% of voters, while this type of voter comprised 1.81% of the overall vote, so they must have made up over 2% on Nov. 2 - maybe the folks fired up the preachers?

Let's assume the simplest (and most benevolent, to Bush) case:

- ASSUME: ALL of the people voting for Kerry also went for Bowles
- ASSUME: ALL of the people voting for Burr also went for Bush
- ASSUME: ALL of the people voting only for prez went for Bush

What is left to explain is the difference in the vote between Burr and Bush. According to the numbers, there must have been a bunch of voters who voted for Bowles for Senate and Bush for Prez.

To be precise, using the simplified assumptions above:

Early & absentee voting
-----------------------
- 23.000 Bowles voters also voted for Bush (4.67% of Bowles voters)

Overall results
---------------
- 106,700 Bowles voters also voted for Bush (6.54% of Bowles voters)

If early and absentee voting made up 30% of the overall, that means close to 8% of Bowles voters went for Bush on election day, compared to only 4.67% in early/absentee voting.

Those preachers must have been on FIRE...

Also note that if some unknown percentage of top-of-the-ticket-only voters went for Kerry, this effect would have to be even greater, as those comprised a much higher percentage on election day than in early voting.

Another note of caution: without a better breakdown of real data, the simplifying assumptions made above could change this conclusion - however, except if we find that a larger number of Burr voters went for Kerry in early voting than overall, almost any change in the assumptions would tend to increase the effect.

On edit: the effect would almost, but not quite, disappear if we assumed that ALL the early/absentee top-of-the-ticket-only voters went for Kerry, while ALL the voting day top-of-the-ticket-only voters went for Bush (7.63% vs. 8%).

I wasn't sure if youwanted this circulated or may be you have done it already?

Yes, please send it where ever and to whom ever it may help.

What you do not understand from my county is although we have long been strong for Republicans this year some things played into this that nation wide coverage may have missed.

First we Love Huffman here all of us even Democrats. McHenry beat him in the Primaries and angered alot of people. Some switched to independent some switched to Democrat and this registered many new voters and was long seen as bad news for Republicans including the President.

I went to early voting with my Husband and a few others we knew they voted early I voted election day. I witnessed the same kind of crowds at early voting and on election day and the same sentiment was expressed either for or against Bush in equal numbers.

Why our numbers aren't out yet I have no clue but if you haven't found out by Monday post a message to me, I will call myself.

Just wanted to say I hope this gets circulated and analyzed further.

Cheers :toast:

totally rural, it's the same thing. We're all furniture around here and it is not getting better. Between outsourcing to China and corporations merging their way to industry dominance and maximized profits the people are being abandoned. I saw more democratic signs and bumper stickers this year than I ever have before. And some of the really right wingers I know acted kinda worried there toward the end of the campaign.

CHeers to you, too! :toast:

and ran some pretty nasty ads against Bowels here did you notice blaming him for everything while Clinton was President including trying to say all the Job loses are Clintons(and Bowels by assos.) Fault I guess they forgot under Clinton we lost a few jobs but we gained a bunch of tech jobs that we are now losing under Bush never to return.

And what is he saying about this??? hmmm, i h8 this

Lots of newbies on this thread! Cheers! :toast:

This is more concurrent evidence of what is happening here in NC....

John Kerry was doing very well in the polls until late September, when, I think the "Swift Boaties" helped to take their toll. Even so, I still thought Kerry, Bowles had a chance. I'm in a small rural county -- west of Winston-Salem, - and for the first time in 14 years I'd seen Democratic posters in a Republican county (including mine and my bumper stickers, thank you very much).

There are several troublesome things going on in NC - from voting machines that started subtracting once it got above a certain number, and more erroneous late night totals in several other counties (as reported by Olbermann today).

:kick: :kick: :kick:

Hi Freep!

Gaston county officials forgot to count 12,000 absentee (early) votes, and I don't know that those are included in your totals. Gaston trends Republican. See article:

http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/news/politics/10160965.htm

Also, Richard Burr really pulled out the big guns in his ad campaigns during the last two weeks specifically. Bowles' ads attacking Burr's stance on breast cancer funding was pretty effectively countered when Burr's sister Debbie, a breast cancer survivor, began appearing in ads to attack Bowles. It was an emotional appeal that may very well have worked to get her brother more votes on election day.

The Democrats did a good job getting the vote out during early voting, especially in urban areas such as Charlotte. Black voters in Charlotte were particularly motivated to vote when Sunday voting was allowed for the first time after right-wing county commissioner Bill James led a last-minute Republican attempt to stop the Sunday voting from going on. His racist comments carried in the Charlotte Observer included calling his detractors "black wackos" and "NAACP groupies".

North Carolina has an odd law requiring that the presidential ticket must be voted seperately from the straight ticket. If you assume that early voters are more motivated and more informed about how to vote, a case could be made that the drop-off in Kerry votes on election day was caused by many voters neglecting to make the seperate vote for president after voting a straight ticket. Also on this subject, the Republicans do a better job IMO on getting information to their voters about how to vote for president as well as their "non-partisan" judges.

for Federal Offices should be the same. IMHO

The general consensus is that the law requiring seperation of the national ticket from the rest of the straight party ticket was put there by the Democrats of the early 70's. They wanted to seperate themselves from McGovern, who was sure to lose in NC even as the statewide candidates won. They did not want to be tied to a sinking ship, as it were. Democrats have almost always had a majority on the state level, and that holds true even today.

State and local Dems tend to be a bit more conservative than national candidates. Governor Mike Easley's ads lambasted his Republican opponent as a tax-raising liberal, while promoting himself as the NRA's choice for governor. The radio ads ran during the Rush Limbaugh show, usually right before a Viagara commercial. Go figure.

The general consensus is that the law requiring seperation of the national ticket from the rest of the straight party ticket was put there by the Democrats of the early 70's. They wanted to seperate themselves from McGovern, who was sure to lose in NC even as the statewide candidates won. They did not want to be tied to a sinking ship, as it were. Democrats have almost always had a majority on the state level, and that holds true even today.

State and local Dems tend to be a bit more conservative than national candidates. Governor Mike Easley's ads lambasted his Republican opponent as a tax-raising liberal, while promoting himself as the NRA's choice for governor. The radio ads ran during the Rush Limbaugh show, usually right before a Viagara commercial. Go figure.

ALL states are important. Some people have bought the line that "nothing matters because they won the popular vote." They didn't. They just stole from everywhere they could to "create that reality." The pretense of inevitability that served them well during the 2000 treason.

They learned from 2000. No spoiled ballots to be recounted. Only paperless theft and a return to the "old ways" of:

* poll-tax-lines (time is money folks) - in selected precincts

* dumped registrations - Dems only

* bloated false registrations - to support false numbers and/or absentee ballots (why else would they conceive of this as a "crime" to accuse Dems of registering Mickey Mouse?)

* transposing numbers or "typos"

Don't sell them short. They've perfected these techniques and no one would argue that they're too honorable to use them. They gloat about the 2000 theft in DC -- off the record of course.

Our position simple; show us the voter.

Not black box printout; Show us the voter.

Not low black turnout; Show us the Voter (that left the unlawful 10-hour line).

Not rationalizations for the anomolies; Show Us the Voter.

Not names on a registration list; Show Us the Voter!

Not signatures in a book; SHOW US the VOTER!

Otherwise we will remind you there is no right to have your electors counted and we will show you the door.

We will only count electors who we feel confident were lawfully appointed. From states whose officials recognize who owns the country and the elections. Who answer only to The People, not to any political party.

www.demonizedliberalposse.com

At UnionCountyforDemocracy.org (NJ) we have decided what needs to be done. Perhaps you agree.

We The People Do Not Concede!

In a true America, leaders serve only with the consent of the governed, and that consent must be obtained by lawful elections that accurately measure the will of the voters. We shall not tolerate any violation of this fundamental principle, the SOLE moral tenet on which our nation was founded and has since relied.

The voting systems and practices used in the conduct of this past election are so clearly flawed that the results in nearly every state are wide open to corruption by systematic vote suppression, data manipulation, human and machine error, and consequently, willful fraud. The only certain result is that we can have NO confidence in how accurately they guage the will of the electorate.

We refuse to further descend into the Stalinist perversion of "democracy;" in which "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." Such was the clear underpinning of the 4-year-old edict of the 5 black-robed political operatives, who arrogated to themselves the perquisite of sentencing the nation by their fiat to live under appointed rule as opposed to elected leadership.

We the People, through our representatives, have set out our election laws to ensure that election results reflect OUR will. In far too many states, demonstrable errors and anomalous patterns of result have rendered the "official" tally suspect. More tragically, the systems and processes implemented by "experts" now make it impossible for us to rule out corruption without further investigation and audit.

Given the likely consequences of once again tacitly accepting corrupt results, the moral burden must now be on each state to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that their results are accurate and lawfully obtained. There is no other patriotic option.

But let us be clear, IF WE ARE UNABLE to obtain this proof under current election law, through civil and/or criminal judicial means, then we MUST RESORT to a political solution and demand that our Congress reject the electors from ANY STATE that fails to validate its results through comprehensive, apolitical investigation and audit.

Our law is intended to serve our will, not thwart it. We can never again allow a "technical" or "legal" arguments and rationalizations to trump reality as we did in 2000.

NEVER AGAIN.

What We Require.

To prove that their election results were lawfully obtained and reflect the will of the voters, we demand that each state:

(1) Provide the data required to prove they did not create discriminatory barriers to voting.

Across the nation, people were forced to wait for hours to even attempt to cast their ballots. This onerous waiting time constitutes a de facto poll tax (time is money). Each state must provide data on wait times at each polling place, demographics of the registered voters served by the polling place, and the number of resources (voting machines, poll workers) assigned and working during operating hours. The burden is on the state to prove, not simply assert, that its practices were not discriminatory.

We will not accept any argument that the discrimination would not have affected the outcome. Such arguments are a sham. Are systematic violations of voting rights OK for those who live in a state in which the margin of victory for one candidate or the other is large? Of course not! Further, if any discrimination is found to be racially based, as was the legal finding of the US Commission on Civil Right in the 2000 Florida election, such a result is unlawful, as well as being intolerably immoral and contrary to American values.

Whatever the margin of victory or number of electoral votes, if any state FAILS TO PROVE that the existence of poll-tax-lines, or any other unnecessary obstruction to voting, was not correlated with RACIAL, SOCIO-ECONOMIC, or PARTISAN STATUS of the voters, that state MUST NOT be afforded the privelege of participation in the electoral vote.

2) Provide to all responsible, professional investigators any necessary records and full access to systems and software, in order to PROVE THAT THE RESULTS WERE NOT CORRUPTED by manipulation, human or machine error, or fraud.

Acceptable investigators will be those sanctioned by any court, professional organization, political party, or other bonding entity willing to warrant their actions. These investigations must be provided the records and access required to examine:

Every tabulation system that consolidates results at any level (e.g., GEMs tabulators).

Every "black box" voting system.

Every undervote, overvote, and spoiled ballot occurance.

Every voter registration record and known voter registration agents and entities.

Every absentee ballot request, delivery record, return envelope, counted and disallowed ballot, any and all records of absentee vote and ballot disposition by any agent or entity.

Every provisional counted and disallowed provisional ballot, unfullfilled provisional ballot request, provisional ballot inventories for each polling station, any and all records of provisional ballot disposition by any agent or entity.

ANY STATE THAT REFUSES to make every effort to successfully confirm that their published vote tallies are free from manipulation and/or error MUST BE considered morally irresponsible and acting contrary to agreed upon American values. There CAN BE NO ACCEPTABLE EXCUSE or rationalization that can compete with the restoration of confidence in our electoral process.

For such a circumstance there can be no other moral, or patriotic response than full criminal investigation and prosecution, civil pursuit of maximum remedies for damage to the body politic, and DENIAL OF THE PRIVILEGE of participation in the Electoral College for any tainted, irregularly appointed, electors who might endeavor to infect the process.

We will accept no verbal assurances, no misleading representations from partial investigations, no shifting of responsibility onto the media or the public at large, and NO DELAY OF ANY KIND.

On this there can be NO COMPROMISE of what is required of us, NO RETREAT from our historic duty, and NO SURRENDER to any agent, foreign or domestic, that would even contemplate any act of obstruction.

and it is The People!O8)

My sentiments exactly. I wish there was a way to do this because you can't tell me I didn't see young, first time black voters coming out in large numbers. Some came in mini-vans with yellow vote for change T-shirts.

There were 7000 Kerry MoveOn people on the ground canvassing the last week in Missouri. There was no Bush movement and Southern Missouri doesn't have the population to overturn the anit-Bush movement.

or else next time around they'll fix the exit polls early and we'll never know what happened.

just wanted to say thanks to you for this! MANY MANY THANKS
and also a kick :)

You know, it might be real interesting to combine the work of a couple of DU'ers. What if we compared:

(a)ignatzmouse's analysis of the "red surge" of election day votes, and
(b) one of the DU studies regarding trends in the exit polling raw data.

Would the results of such an analysis further "bracket" ignatzmouse's "red surge" into the final hours of NC voting?

of the NC Elections Board with this information. (He's sick of me writing) don.wright@ncmail.net

Also send it to the Charlotte Observer:
localnews@charlotteobserver.com

Winston-Salem Journal:
letters@wsjournal.com

For the Raleigh News and Observer, you'd have to send a hard copy. I can't get a non-form email addy.

The more people that write in, the more seriously they'll take it.

(also posted in the NC forum)

Thank you so much ignatzmouse....

I've just fired off some email alerts - good idea.

I understand that a small number of registered voters from a state may demand a recount. You don't have to be one of the candidates on the ballot. Check out NC and see if it is 3 or 5 or whatever and go for it.

Your analysis is awesome. Now follow it up with action. Let's get it out of DU and aboveground where it will HAVE to be noticed.

Great work

1st post here - Thanks for having me...

Out of all counties up to Lincoln alphabetically, (My excel can only import 65,000 or so rows, if anyone knows how to increae this, let me know), there are 13 counties where Kerry beat Bush in the absentee ballots. Out of these 13 counties, there are only 3 precincts where Bush received over 75% of the total Bush+Kerry votes (ignoring other votes). In other words there are 3 precincts where Bush beat Kerry 3 to 1 in counties where absentees picked Kerry over Bush countywide.

These precincts are:

Windsor #2 - Bertie County
Sharpsburg - Edgecombe County
Roanoke Rapids #6 - Halifax County

Observations on this:

1) There aren't that many precints where this has occurred, certainly not enough to support a hypothesis of hiding huge Bush margins in individual, small precincts.

2) If anyone was to begin investigating the NC vote at a precinct level based on the discrepancies between absentees and election day votes, these 3 precincts are where I would start.

3) Just because there is not a huge number of precincts where this pattern exists, does not mean the absentee vs. election day discrepancy is not a good indicator of some larger issue. With 175,000 precincts nationwide, and a 3.5 million vote margin, that only means that the current "huge" popular vote margin can be achieved with only 20 votes per precinct. Swinging a vote by 20, or even 100, votes might not show up in the above analysis.


WE NEED AS MUCH PRECINT LEVEL DATA AS POSSIBLE! The smallest data sets are the ones that show discrepancies the most clear and are the easiest to investigate for concrete evidence of misconduct.

Recommend you to send your data/results to Steve Freeman PhD: stfreema@sas.upenn.edu
He did a statistical analysis on the early exit polls that predicted a clear Kerry electoral win.

Cheers! :toast:

as many rows as you need; you can download it for free at http://www.openoffice.org :-)

Yes, it was the strange Bertie County that initially led me into this trail. Here is that info from a previous post:

I chose a predominately black county to give a sharper idea and get free of the crossover voter charge. Here are the demographics for Bertie County, North carolina as of 10-31-2004.

Bertie County has 14,460 registered voters:

Party Affiliation
12052 DEM 83%
1403 REP 10%
1005 UNA/LIB 7%

Ethnicity
8685 BLACK 60%
5633 WHITE 39%
18 AM.INDIAN
12 HISPANIC
34 OTHER

GENDER
8370 FEMALE 58%
6017 MALE 42%

So you can see in every category, this is a Democratic lock.

This is how the vote was recorded:

4801 Kerry/Edwards 61%
3027 Bush/Cheney 38%
35 Badnarik 1%
2 Nader -
7865 Total (a turnout of 54%)

On the face, it's shocking to see a 22% drop in the Democratic vote and a 28% gain in the Republican vote of registered voters. But, we have to be careful in the rural South even in a county that is mostly black. As a reference, let's also look at how the county voted in 2000.

DEM - A. Gore-J. Lieberman 4,660 65%
REP - G. W. Bush-D. Cheney 2,488 35%
LIB - H. Browne-A. Olivier 11 0%
RFM - P. Buchanan-E. Foster 17 0%
7,176

Hmmmm. Well, that shows a 7% swing from 2000 to 2004 for Bush/Cheney. A little hard to believe, but not totally impossible I guess given the possibility that this might be an overwhelmingly democratic black county filled with big Rush Limbaugh fans. Let's look at some further numbers from Bertie and see if they can shed some light.

Senate
Bowles (D) 5089 66%
Burr (R) 2614 34%
Bailey 51 >1%
Total 7754

Governor
Easley (D) 5592 73%
Ballantine (R) 2036 27%
Howe 66 .009%
Total 7694

Secretary of State
Marshall (D) 5,624 77%
Rao (R) 1,650 23%
Total 7274

Notice the Senate race also appears exceptionally supressed for the Democrats. All other races in Bertie County ran roughly in the range of 73-78% Democrat to 22-27% Republican except for President and Senator.

I'll need some time today to sift through the numbers. I'll post more observations a little later today.

Here's the results for Bertie County as of yesterday:

Total:
Bush 3057 38.1%
Kerry 4938 61.5% (+23.4%)

Absentee:
Bush 792 41.4%
Kerry 1111 58.1% (+16.7%)

Election Day:
Bush 2265 37.0%
Kerry 3827 62.5% (+25.5%) (Election Day - Asbentee = +8.8%)

Bertie County uses a Direct Record Electronic Machine by Fidler, according to NCVoter.Net.

If anything, these Bertie County results are a direct opposite to the hypothesis, however, these numbers vary cosiderably from county-county, and trend to favoring Bush, obviously.

The counties which generated the most Bush votes because of this phenomenon are:

Wake (ED - Abs = -11.4%) (11.4% x ED Votes Cast = 14,132)
Mecklenburg (ED - Abs = -6.2%) (6.2% x ED Votes Cast = 6,852)
Forsyth (ED - Abs = -9.0%) (9.0% x ED Votes Cast = 4,905)
Orange (ED - Abs = -27.4%) (27.4% x ED Votes Cast = 4,253)

Overall, 17 counties had over 1,000 votes gained for Bush this way.

Only 4 counties gave Kerry over 1,000 votes because of this phenomenon:

Johnston (+14.2%) (+3753)
Guilford (+6.0%) (+3640)
Wayne (+19.6%) (+1854)
Lenoir (+23.4%) (+1853)

Statewide, my numbers show a 7.3% total swing for Bush from Absentee Votes to non-Absentee votes, which would account for an approx. 175,000 vote swing on election day.

Of the 17 counties with +1000 gained Bush votes, 7 used Direct Record Electronic machines, 6 used Optical Scan Machines, & 4 used Punchcards.

Of the 4 counties with +1000 gained Kerry votes, 2 used DRE, & 2 used Op Scan.

Overall, the Punchard/Lever/Paper counties showed an 8.8% swing for Bush on Election Day compared to absentees. The Optical Scanner counties showed a 10.8% swing, and the Direct Record Electronic counties showed a 3.8% swing.

Unfortunately, the paper trail counties also showed a large swing for Bush, and makes the likelihood of the phenomonon occuring due to machine tampering, or something similar, pretty small.

Of course, this doesn't someone mean can't tamper with the paper trail votes on Election Day as well. It just means that fraud could be proved more easily if it occurred. And based on your statewide #'s, and analysis of the different race results, I don't see how it couldn't have been altered somehow.

Again, I'm going to keep looking at these #'s today, and post some more observations later.

....if you know of any effort in NC to subpoena access records, physical and telecom, for the central tabulating centers. As you know, the "fidler" (ironic name) machines are manufactured by diebold.

And, as you realize all the tallies, irrespective of how the ballots were cast, merge at some point.

So, what will be quite important is that when the recount starts in NC -- I can't imagine it not happening -- that the paper ballots are kept separate from the punch cards and those kept separate from whatever source of data is available from the DRE machines. Then comparisons can be made with the records from the central tabulating centers and with registration records and with exit poll data.

Patterns will emerge; it'll be interesting to see what they are.

Has the recount NC effort gotten underway yet.

AT THE BOE:

It looks like a SAS file: I'm downloading it now:

http://www.sboe.state.nc.us/index.html

Wow ignatzmouse. You've convinced me. I made a bunch of bar graphs using your information:

http://www.geocities.com/aquarianwind/nccomparisoncharts.html

I will pass this information on to Erskine Bowles personally. I think he'd be quite interested to know this...

Cheers, to you as well!!:toast:

If you know Erskine, our message to him is that the NC DU'ers would like to meet with him. We need Erskine to react to these numbers. Please set up a meeting and relay to the board the time and location for the meeting. ;-)

Thank you!

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/12/233831/06

Perhaps you want to comment there on the details of this study. You or any other DUers!

Apparently Timebound and I were working on graphs at the same time, as I've also made some based on the data. I don't know how mine compare to Timebound's, however, because I can't load their page right now.

I've got three charts here: http://home.comcast.net/~rhosgobel/DU/NC-DU-data.html

Here are a few definitive numbers to shore up my conclusions.

If one totals all the Democratic votes cast in all the statewide races against all the Republican votes cast in all the statewide races (except for President and Senator) one comes up with:

Democratic votes: 17,890,020
Republican votes: 15,495,669
(cumulative totals for all races)

Thus, purely as an index to the make-up of the state, it's:
Democrats: 53.6%
Republicans: 46.4%

Looking at cumulative votes cast for each party's candidates in the absentee votes, we find:

Democrats: 5,374,642 54.6%
Republicans: 4,472,273 45.4%

As I stated earlier, that coincides with a 1% Democratic advantage in the early/absentee voting (excluding of course the majority Republican County of Catawba). But, even that is negated when one considers that there were still far more Democratic votes cast on election day than Republican votes cast.

Election Day Polls:

Democrats: 12,515,378 53.2%
Republicans: 11,023,396 46.8%

Taking that into account, the disparity of both the Presidential and Senatorial votes is glaring.

PRESIDENT (early/absentee)
George W. Bush: 529,755 52.9%
John F. Kerry: 469,522 46.9% -6.0

PRESIDENT (election day)
George W. Bush: 1,431,433 57.3%
John F. Kerry: 1,056,299 42.3% -15.0

**********************************
SENATOR (absentee)
Richard Burr (REP): 492,166 49.48%
Erskine Bowles (DEM): 492,536 49.52% +0.04

SENATOR (poll only)
Richard Burr (REP): 1,299,294 52.4%
Erskine Bowles (DEM): 1,139,973 46.0% -6.4

Remember, the *Dixie-crat factor was already figured into the absentee voting* for Bush over Kerry. Kerry was behind, was polled behind, and ran in the exit polls behind by 6%. Nowhere in that figure can anyone account for the other two-thirds of the vote suddenly dropping him to minus 15% on election day. Likewise, there is no way to explain away a small lead for Bowles in the early/absentee votes suddenly changing into a minus 6.4% gap on election day. Even granted the 1% fudge factor, the Democratic numbers were still higher on election day and would have swamped it short of perhaps a good technological fudge recipe.

This information is unbelievable. I wish somebody in the media would take this and run with it. I guess nobody wants another 60 minutes fiasco. Anyway....Doesn't it seem unlikely that the election day "swing" percentage is nearly identical for the Senatorial and Presidential races??

They traced that anthrax back to some right wing military site. It's very clear to people what will happen to them if they step out of line.

And let me be the first to say "Welcome to DU, no1hedberg!!!"

Cheers! :toast:

Just, WOW! That is one of the best pieces of analysis I have seen in a long time!!




Simply amazing! Thank you for doing this!

This is incredible work, Mouse. IMO, we have to get as many people doing similar research on other states, especially the highly black box states . I'm sending this to my son and all his college friends who have time on their hands. Going to beg them to do some work on this. I'm afraid the data will start disappearing from web sites when they realize I.M. has found a way to open the Black Box.
Love to all on DU,
David

vri@dnc.org, and to my Senators in California. I want the word to really get out that this is serious business across the board and we won't stand for them pretending it doesn't exist (I don't mean my Senators in particular, especially. I just have this sense that till now, few elected officials cared even though they've been hearing about BBV for a long time.)

We also had new touch screen machines for the first time. Used to have the old kind with levers. I also noticed that as votes were being "tabulated" after the polls closed, CNN's county map of VA had lots of counties flipping from blue to red. Is any one looking into Virginia discrepancies? I haven't been due to combination of work and small kids.

The discrepancy b/w the exit polls and "actual" results -- particularly in Ohio, NH, NC, and Florida -- raised a red flag in my mind. Still, I remained skeptical about the accusations of fraud. The numbers ignatzmouse has crunched offer the most compelling evidence that fraud occurred on Election Day. I'm becoming a believer.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

I live in Greensboro, and I know that my grandfather in Charlotte and his wife, who are Christian evangelicals, told me that they were voting for Kerry because Bush had record deficits and had destabilized the world and lied about doing it, by going into Iraq.

I was surprised but glad to hear it. I am sure that they were not alone in their crossover voting.

No matter what happens we need election reform now. If the people can't trust our election process here how do we justify promoting democracy across the planet.

We need to make sure our voices continue to be heard, not as fringe INTERNET conspiracy theorists, but as concerned citizens. We cannot let the media continue to discredit our valid concerns, This story must be told.

Does anyone remember if exit polls showed what Kerry's total popular vote should have been? Would he have gotten the 51% of the vote, or would it have been higher?

First time poster - Thanks for your tremendous effort on this subject. I live in Charlotte so I have a vested interest in your results.

Esse Quam Videri...it's the state motto of North Carolina; it translates "to be, rather than to seem"

Clever choice!

I too was stunned that Bowles didn't win. Even with the negative ads that really began to pop out just before the election.

Something just doesn't feel right about this.

I live in Mecklenburg Co and we went blue for Kerry, but something tells me that some of the surrounding counties should have too. There have been so many mill jobs lost and I would have thought they would have voted in higher numbers for him as well.

Maybe not Union Co, home of Jesse Helms, but some of the others maybe.

Where is the media? The New York Times calls us conspiracy theorists.

:dem::loveya::bounce::toast::smoke::yourock::smoke::toast::bounce::loveya::kick:

One of the problems with the absentee analysis is that the absentee/early vote are two different demographics. Absentee mail-ins are lumped in together with early voters on most of the state, but mail-ins are heavily Republican.
For instance, in Wake County NC the mail-ins went
Absentee Mail Kerry 4533 Bush 5676
while the early votes went Kerry 47,878 Bush 40,635
(Bush carried the county by 7500 votes)

was the analysis just early voters or all absentees? if they are lumped in together it makes it not as clean as it looks, because you are lumping in absent military and business travelers with an early voting base that was more Democratic

If the theory is that absentee voters are more heavily Republican (Military, "Business Travelers"?), then if they were lumped into the early voting demographics, it would skew the pre-election day votes more to Bush. We're saying here that the pre-election day votes were more pro-Kerry than the election day results. Mixed demographics with a high Republican absentee representation only support the point.