Berkeley's published report is available to read. Oh-oh, Jeb.

Here's their Summary of Findings:

The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections

Summary:

- Irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000 excess votes or more to President George W. Bush in Florida.

-Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for President Bush between 2000 and 2004. This effect cannot be explained by differences between counties in income, number of voters, change in voter turnout, or size of Hispanic/Latino population.

-In Broward County alone, President Bush appears to have received approximately 72,000 excess votes.

-We can be 99.9% sure that these effects are not attributable to chance.

Details:

Because many factors impact voting results, statistical tools are necessary to see the effect of touch-screen voting. Multiple regression analysis is a statistical technique widely used in the social and physical sciences to distinguish the individual effects of many variables.

This multiple-regression analysis takes account of the following variables by county:
- number of voters
- median income
- Hispanic population
- change in voter turnout between 2000 and 2004
- support for President Bush in 2000 election
- support for Dole in 1996 election

When one controls for these factors, the association between electronic voting and increased support for President Bush is impossible to overlook. The data show with 99.0% certainty that a county’s use of electronic voting is associated with a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush.

The data used in this study come from CNN.com, the 2000 US Census, the Florida Department of State, and the Verified Voting Foundation – all publicly available sources. This study was carried out by a group of doctoral students in the UC Berkeley sociology department in collaboration with Professor Michael Hout, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center.


http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/election04_Sum.pdf

___________________


Here's some highlights from the full report:

Finding

Electronic voting raised President Bush’s advantage from the tiny edge he held in 2000 to a clearer margin of victory in 2004. 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. The state-wide impact of these disparities due to electronic voting amount to 130,000 votes if we assume a “ghost vote” mechanism and twice that – 260,000 votes – if we assume that a vote misattributed to one candidate should have been counted for the other.

<snip>

As baseline support for Bush increases in Florida counties, the change in percent voting for Bush from 2000 to 2004 increases, but at a decreasing rate. Electronic voting has a main, positive effect on the dependent variable. Furthermore, there is an interaction effect between baseline support for Bush and electronic voting, and between baseline support for Bush squared and electronic voting. Support for Dole in 1996, county size, median income, and Hispanic population had no significant effect net of the other effects. Essentially, net of other effects, electronic voting had the greatest positive effect on change in percent voting for Bush from 2000 to 2004 in democratic counties.

We also examined the effect of electronic voting machines and baseline support for Bush on change in percent voting for Bush in Ohio. The OLS regression model used percent voting for Bush in 2004 by county as the dependent variable and baseline support for Bush and electronic voting as independent variables, as well as an interaction effect between baseline support for Bush and electronic voting. Without controlling for change in voter turnout, size, median income, Hispanic population, or percent voting for Dole in 1996, we found no effect of electronic voting on change in percent voting for Bush from 2000 to 2004 in Ohio.

In order to understand the effects of electronic voting in terms of the number of votes for Bush, we translated our dependent variable (percent voting for Bush in Florida in 2004) into raw votes. By setting Electronic Voting equal to zero, we created a predicted percentage change in support for Bush without the effect of electronic voting. We added the predicted percentage change in support for Bush to the percentage of votes he received in 2000. This gave us a predicted percentage of votes for Bush in 2004, which we multiplied by the number of votes in each county to get a predicted number of votes without the effect of electronic voting. We then subtracted this number from the number of votes Bush received, as estimated by the full regression model, including the Electronic Voting effect. Summing these effects for the fifteen counties with electronic voting yields the total estimated excess votes in favor of Bush associated with Electronic Voting; this figure is 130,733.

http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/index.html

___________________

Too bad the Ohio data doesn't show an effect. But at least this shows the Berkeley people are non-partisan. I'm looking forward to TruthIsAll's comments on this.

Anybody know what size handcuffs Jeb wears?

berkley rocks

:donut:

I believe the no effect in ohio has to do with e voting machines.

well since most of poor or minority (i e democratic ) districts in Ohio use punch-card ballots then you can use the theory that fraud was committed in republican counties for Bush but rather increasing his support in democratic counties.

and central tabulation computers. They didn't even use very many DREs. (The paper counts op-scan as "non-electronic".

Rove was smart enough not to have one method that turned the election, instead he used a set of methods making it harder to prove coordination. I wonder if he planned a backup plan for each method if they all are discoverred.

He just goes to the rep governors or the rep committees in each state and says, "Make it happen." Then they work down from there.

in Ohio was. Apparently, they only examined the effect of touchscreens. It doesn't mean Ohio wasn't fraudulent in other ways.

the recount will prove innaccuracies in OH.

BUSHIES!! YOU CAN RUN, BUT YOU CAN'T HIDE...HEHEHE

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

eom

Busted, motherfuckers!!!!

"As baseline support for Bush increases in Florida counties, the change in percent voting for Bush from 2000 to 2004 increases, but at a decreasing rate."

Maybe that's the key to the algorithym. Creating a mechanism to automatically give Bush a graduated vote increase would help keep the overall voting from glaring extremes.

padding might have happened, and I had an inkling to that effect. Thanks. :thumbsup:

Sorry about that, Jeb. Okay, no, not really. :evilgrin:

"Statistical patterns in counties that did not have e-touch
voting machines predict a 28,000 vote decrease in President Bush's support in Broward County; machines tallied an increase of 51,000 votes - a net gain of 81,000 for the incumbent. President Bush should have lost 8,900 votes in Palm Beach County, but instead gained 41,000 - a difference of 49,900. He should have gained only 18,400 votes in Miami-Dade County but saw a gain of 37,000 - a difference of 19,300 votes."

I wonder if BBV is keeping track of this. Last I heard they were still in FL to audit other counties. They should attempt to look at some of the counties listed above. If they were to discover the same patterns as listed above it could help with supporting Berkley's report and be validation for more through investigations.

So this study was soley done on e-voting machines, not optiscan of paper ballots, correct? Could optiscan counties make up the rest of the difference?

http://uscountvotes.org/

For example, Volusia was non-e-vote...

hmmm...

15 use DRE.

Maybe they had to have diff strategies for slanting the vote in OH, so that is why we have been hearing so much about the blatant voter suppression there. It's easier when your corrupt brother has a whole state enforcement process in place. Blackwell doesn't sound as smart as Jeb, either.

And then there are the central tally computers....and all sorts of ways to get rid of ballots from people you don't want voting....and so many other ways to get those Kerry numbers down.

This is great. The mass of fraud evidence is, well, amassing nicely. And then there will be the recounts in NH and OH, and Bev's work in Volusia....

The suspense is killing me. I surely hope Kerry's early withdrawal is part of a strategy for eventually challenging the electin. Lots of apparent clues that this is so, but until it happens, the doubt is so awful.

Didn't Ohio's touch-screens have some sort of paper-printout trail added to them? So that there IS a paper-trail in Ohio's electionic (NOT opti-scan) machines?

Snip:

The UC Berkeley report has not been peer-reviewed, but a reputable MIT political scientist

succeeded in replicating the analysis Thursday at the request of the Herald and The Associated Press. He said an investigation is warranted.

"There is an interesting pattern here that I hope someone looks into," said MIT Arts and Social Sciences Dean Charles Stewart III, a researcher in the MIT-Caltech Voting Technology Project

http://www.trivalleyherald.com/Stories/0,1413,86~10669~...

your link address got cut off at the end.

http://www.trivalleyherald.com/Stories/0,1413,86~10669~2545298,00.html

My working hypothesis is as follows. I don't have the statistical or computer expertise to follow up on it, or the time, since it involves many states, but it sure has a strong gut feeling to it, that hit me around midnight Nov. 2.

1. In several of the "red" states that were threatening to go "blue" at the time of the election, tweak the election toward Bush to keep Bush competitive in the Electoral Vote--probably using central vote tabulators, and taking advantage of paperless voting precincts.

2. Grab small %'s here and there all over the country, wherever conditions are right for minimal chance of detection, to create a reasonable popular vote majority--not too big, just enough. This could even include big Kerry states, where a few anomalous votes for Bush might not be noticed (and big Kerry counties, as found by the Berkeley study!)

3. So then it all comes down to Ohio (or FLA) where lots of prep has been done in voter suppression, to keep it close, and where the provisional ballot situation in Ohio (created by unfairly challenging duly registered voters, with Blackwell in place to "count" them--or not) becomes ideal for the grande finale, or grande illusion, if you will, that everything depends on these relatively few votes--when the truth is that the main part of the fraud occurred way back upstream.

The more I learn about the "set-up" (the central vote tabulator software owned and controlled--and kept secret--by Bush donors and rightwing religious fanatics; the ease of hacking into it (it doesn't take much at all); no paper trail in a third of the country; the voting system wide open to fraud; the rarity of such an insecure, fraud-prone election system vis a vis other countries), and the more evidence that comes in, the more this working hypothesis is confirmed.

I hope there are people looking at the "red" states where Kerry was closing on Bush just before the election, and at other places (New York, Calif., PA) where whopping big Kerry majorities might be masking portions of the popular vote theft.

A working hypothesis has to take a lot of things into consideration. Means. Motive. Opportunity. And also a judgment of the players. When you think about it, putting this sort of temptation in front of a man like Karl Rove--secret source code, no paper trail--what is the likelihood that he would resist it--given his history, and the desperation of Bush Inc. to stay in power (so much dirt to cover up)?

I'm not making a particular personal accusation. Bush Inc. is full of Karl Rove types (anything goes). I guess it's a judgment of their whole scene. Would they do this? Of course they would!

There is also the consideration of how things were going just before the election--opinion poll analysis indicating a Kerry win-- and on election day--exit polls saying Kerry won, big.

The means, motive and opportunity were all there, in spades. According to Chuck Herrin (computer expert, hacker, remorseful Republican) hacking Diebold is as simple as pie. He can't believe they DIDN'T do it, it's so easy.

See: http://www.chuckherrin.com/hackthevote.htm, and other pages at www.chuckherrin.com.

A working hypothesis is essential to uncovering a crime of this magnitude and deviousness. But it's just a tool. It can and should be questioned, and discarded or altered as facts come in. I tend to think there was a Grand Master in charge--a master planner--who had several scenarios prepared, and amended the plot as things developed. It is looking like a master work of the dark arts, to be sure. But I don't think very many people were involved, or needed, for the main part of the fraud--and the rest (criminal vote suppresssion of Democrats and minorities, etc.) is just partisan politics in BushWorld.

And even if they didn't steal it (which is growing more improbable every day), the fact that they COULD--easily--should cause very great alarm.

Rightwing fanatics now control the presidency, the Congress, the courts, the media and the election system. I think we're one minute to midnight, as to losing our democracy.

We need to

1. Use every tool available, and all our energy, time and resources, to challenge and overturn this election.

2. Get organized on a state by state, county by county, basis, to achieve, a) a paper trail everywhere, and b) open source code. (Congress is not to be trusted about this. Look at the disaster they gave us with HAVA!)

3. Put it to the Democratic leadership--which is guilty of catastrophic negligence on the voting system--either fight for our democracy NOW, or goodbye to you.

especially stands out.

Welcome to DU!

I looked at some of the counties in Minnesota that apparently had very high turnout (it's hard to tell exactly how high because Minnesota allows same day registration on election day and didn't have those numbers posted yet). Most of these extremely high turnout counties used some kind of central tabulation (most were optical scan) and most went heavily for Bush. Another interesting stat is that Minnesota swung toward Bush by 5.5% from predictions of the 6 pm (est) exit polls (sample size=2178). I am a mathematician but not a statistician and would like to find someone good with EXCEL to help analyse the voting data from Minnesota. Anyone? I think Iowa should be scrutinized very closely (the unofficial count there was very close). Does anyone know where those results are? I haven't been able to find any.

From:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/ELECTION_AFTERMATH?SITE=MELEE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Academia Still Fixated on John Kerry

By RACHEL KONRAD
AP Technology Writer

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- John Kerry conceded defeat more than two weeks ago, and President Bush has already revamped his Cabinet. But as states certify final election returns, an academic debate over their accuracy is heating up.

None of the experts examining the returns has discovered voting anomalies significant enough to have swung the election.

Despite Internet-circulated speculation that Bush's victory was somehow stolen or rigged, the incumbent's clear margin in the popular vote count is much wider than any of the problems reported to date - be they voting technology failures, problems with provisional ballots or partisan shenanigans.

"We conclude that there is no evidence, based on exit polls, that electronic voting machines were used to steal the election for President Bush," researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said in an influential report based on early unofficial returns in Florida.

Still, many Americans who mistrust e-voting have seized on the exit polls, wondering whether something nefarious might explain what happened on Nov. 2. Early in the day, exit polling suggested Kerry was heading for a close win in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania; by day's end, Kerry had won Pennsylvania but Bush had comfortable margins in both Florida and Ohio.

While voting machine makers said their equipment had few problems given the millions of ballots cast, watchdog groups received about 2,000 complaints about lost and miscounted votes and machine breakdowns. Nearly three-dozen Kerry supporters in Florida said they had to repeatedly override the machines to avoid having their votes recorded for Bush.

Internet buzz that perhaps the exit polls were correct and the actual returns might be flawed grew louder this week when sociology graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley went public with an analysis arguing that Florida results in counties using electronic ballots differed from historical voting patterns.

These counties delivered 130,000 to 260,000 more votes for Bush than the group expected, based on a statistical model that factored in population trends, income levels and other predictors of voting behavior.

The official vote count shows Bush won Florida by nearly a 381,000-vote margin, with strong growth in the traditionally Democratic counties of south Florida. Critics of the Berkeley research say Bush's success may simply be due to a better get-out-the-vote effort, or fears of terrorism driving many Democrats to choose Bush over party loyalty.

"Nationwide it looks like, regardless of the type of voting machines used, Bush was getting a faster mobilization of voters in traditionally Democratic areas than were the Democrats," said Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at MIT who specializes in American politics and research methodology.

Stewart said any Florida discrepancies between historic patterns and the Nov. 2 vote may be explained by nationwide trends - for example, while Republicans easily won many rural and suburban areas they also made impressive gains in urban areas.

The state that gave Bush the biggest number of votes was New York, which does not use electronic voting machines. South Florida - the state's most urban region - may have followed a similar pattern of showing steady Republican gains, Stewart said.

But because touch-screen machines lack paper records and ballots can't be examined individually in a recount, the Berkeley students said looking for anomalies is the only way to gauge whether the machines recorded ballots the way voters intended.

They decided to create a model that would account for any available data that might explain why Bush gained votes since 2000 in most of Florida's 15 counties that switched to electronic voting machines.

For instance, wealthier counties often swing Republican and can afford expensive voting computers. The students' model for analysis thus factored out the impact of wealth.

However, their study only considered possible explanations for the combination of Bush's victory and the presence of e-voting equipment. For example, they didn't factor in the number of campaign visits that the Bush campaign made to a county, or the number of residents who consider themselves evangelical Christians.

Still, the Berkeley group hopes Florida officials will take a closer look at the vote in light of their study to rule out fears that the vote was somehow manipulated in the crucial swing state.

"We view this as a smoke alarm that we need to tell the fire department about," said Berkeley sociology professor Michael Hout. "It's up to local officials to figure out what actually happened in their jurisdictions."

Florida published certified returns Sunday, and some counties across the nation are still counting provisional ballots. As more data is released, further scrutiny is expected from academia and from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. But the pace of such research is slow.

Michael Alvarez, a CalTech political science professor, didn't publish his analysis of 2000 election data until the spring of 2001.

"I don't anticipate us being any quicker this time," he said.

Now this article sounds like a republican defense rather than an objective journalistic article (see title).

Very different the story in german Online-magazine spiegel.de ("Spiegel" is the biggest serious weekly-magazine in germany):

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,328692,00.html

There have to be more - serious - studies like this. Media take it serious. I hope Berkeley are going for North Carolina next...

you know if this is such a wacko, zilch, nothing story then why do these people even take the time to slam it?! At what point do vote discrepancies become serious?? Only when they change the outcome (which they have I might add)!? And what the hell does the popular vote have to do with anything?! Geez! if that’s what’s really important – how come the media didn’t come charging to Al Gore’s defense??

Sorry, general rant not directed at anyone in particular.

I realize this is a different subject, but I felt it's important.

Dr. Freeman has a new draft of "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy"

It responds very strongly to his debunkers.

He has asked that people link directly to his site,
http://www.appliedresearch.us/sf
where he will be posting updates rather than to the first rough draft, which is what many people are still linking to.


:-)

I just browsed that report again and found this near the end when he comments. It says:

"But many have been allegations of mistabulation and worse. Three Precinct workers from the Appalachian section of OHIO, for example, wrote:

360 people signed the book and 33 absentee ballots were cast for a total of 393 votes. The Board of Election is reporting 489 votes cast in that one precinct. WE HAVE A COPY OF THE ENTIRE POLL BOOK for this precinct. (other totals were hand checked)"


Do we at DU know of which precinct this is or heard this story yet?

It sure fits my working hypothesis (Comment #22 this page) that they put together Bush's popular vote by stealing small %'s here and there, all over the country (especially where voting was least secure--in paperless voting districts). The reason we're getting a lot of reports of these kinds of voting anomalies from Ohio and FLA is because a lot of attention is being paid to those states--the battleground states, where vote suppression was most dramatic.

But we need to look elsewhere as well. I agree that North Carolina is a good place to look for Bush padding (and their pick up of Electoral Votes in the close "red" state part of the game). But, really, we need to look everywhere--all states--for the popular vote padding. (What happened with Nebraska and the report of 10,000 more votes than voters? Anybody know?)

Ohio and FLA are also vital right now--because the election turns on them (big Electoral votes).

I wrote to the FLA Dem Party and DNC lawyers yesterday, trying to light a fire under them to request a recount. I cited the Berkeley report, among other things. (It has been confirmed by MIT scientists, by the way--who also call for an investigation.) I'm not sure what-all is happening in FLA on the recount front. (I know the election had to be certified first--before a recount request could be lodged.)

I'd like to know where my $100 went, that I contributed on Election Night to the legal fund "to count every vote"--after Kerry's victory mysteriously disappeared.

What are these people waiting for?

Several precincts in Cuyahoga county report >100% turnout implying more votes than voters (and more with >80% turnout which is very unlikely). And this Apalachian precinct is now another explicit example where more votes counted than voters. How many others?

The Kathy Dopp analysis (which is what got me started on all this mess) pointed to the optiscan precints but not the touchscreens. Now, we have the Berkley Study which does exactly the opposite. I'm tired, worn out, and really wish Krugman wasn't writing a textbook right now. Does anyone have any explanations or theories about this?

I emailed the authors the following letter with an attached Excel file. I can't attach the Excel file here, but I'd be happy to email it to whomever requests it.

--BEGIN E-MAIL------------

Dear Michael Hout, Laura Mangels, Jennifer Carlson, and Rachel Best:

In the attached Excel file, I detail three separate arguments, each of which raise doubts as to the conclusion you reach in "Working Paper: The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections" (last updated November 18, 2004).

My starting point for each argument uses the results found in your Table 2, Model 1. NOTE: See the tab, "table 2 model 1 (original)", in the attached Excel file.

"Argument #1 - predict bd_change": If we try to use the same methodology to measure the effect of e-voting on the 2000 elections, one should expect to find no effect. But, the same methodology shows nearly as much "effect" of e-voting on the 2000 elections as on the 2004 elections. This should lead us to doubt the methodology itself.

"Argument #2 - one subsitution": The model should be robust enough that minor changes to the independent variables do not affect the final result much. However, if one substitutes 'logit(b00pc)*etouch' for 'b00pc*etouch' , the result is completely different. Therefore, the results in the original model are probably not reliable.

"Argument #3 - full subsitution": If instead, one tries substituting ALL the percent-style variables (even the dependent variable) with logit-style variables, as described in Argument #2, the result still shows no significant association between etouch and the dependent variable.

I'd love to discuss this with you. Please let me know what you think.

Thanks,
-Martin


--END E-MAIL------------