Florida should be recounted statewide.

A small recount by the Miami Herald had Kerry picking up a significant number of votes:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/30/2624/5286

There should be a statewide recount.

Should we contact the Florida Democratic Party?

It can be done unofficially with neutral observers, maybe from the UN?, and at least discredit *'s win.

TC

ventures to get involved with something like demanding a recount.

at this point the ballots are public record and anyone (for a fee) can ask to be shown the ballots.

NT

It took 8 hours to inspect about 10,000 ballots.

So you can count about 1250 ballots per hour x $35.

My guess is it would cost less than $500 to recount every vote in Suwannee County.

Of course, rates may vary from county to county, but at least this gives us a baseline.

NT

Pocket change compared to the 14 million Kerry had left over in his war chest.

and they're the ones who did the count. His logic is... illogical.

Kos anaylsis was very interesting. These were 3 bush counties. Reporters did see small net shifts to Kerry in the 2 they counted completely, but they stopped counting the third when they were about 60% done. Why? Bush's % of votes in the hand count vs.original was a LOSS of 3.9%.! IF assume the same % change for the remaining uncounted ballots, and that bush*s go to Kerry, Kerry gains 1208 votes out of 15675 in a dixiecrat county! One obvious caveat: we don't know if the recount was done by precinct. If 60% were in precincts that originally went more for Kerry, and the remaining 40% were more bush, then analysis is flawed.
Buf this were to hold true statewide, Kerry is easily the winner, especially since we know he had unusually small numbers in the democratic counties.

Presumably, the first 2 counties don't need a hand recount, but that 3rd one sure does!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x93139

The DU-ers there have isolated the specific precincts analyzed in the third Dixiecrat county (the county where the Herald stopped counting at 60% of the vote). They have verified with the paper that these were the precincts chosen, and have also discovered that the Herald just happened to select those precincts where Bush's lead was the smallest.

I kicked the thread because I think it is very important info. We should make sure the other 40% of that county's votes get counted, to see if our theory is borne out.



Here is how it was all tied together by "PointsofLight":

My analysis of the numbers showed that the only way for Bush's numbers in the hand count to "catch up" with his official tally is if the Herald only counted the precincts that were more favorable to Kerry, and did not count the 10 or so of those that went most heavily to Bush. Well, as you show, that's apparently what they did.

Makes no sense to do it that way if they were truly looking for anomalies that padded Bush's total. If they were sincerely doing that, why would they ignore the precincts where Bush won by the biggest margin? But of course we know that that wasn't their goal.

Regardless of all of these details, their claim that there is "no flaw in Bush's state win" is still ridiculous and is obviously driven by political motives. Yeah, lets only hand count in those counties that are known to be dixiecrat counties, and that statisticians have already said aren't a big problem. And lets cherry pick the precincts so that we avoid those where Bush won by the biggest margin. And lets include a bunch of rhetoric and snide remarks from partisan election officials. And lets generalize from 0.3% of the vote in three small, dixecrat counties to the entire state. And lets ignore the counties that statisticians have pointed out to be a problem, like Miami-Dade and Broward. And lets ignore the counties where very suspicious activity has already been uncovered, a vote tallies do not match, like Volusia County.

But yeah, they're fair, non-partisan investigative reporters.

The precincts were chosen by the Miami Herald, and all but one were those where * got the lowest numbers (not likely to be random). Since not random, can't assume same % change for *. But if he lost votes in his worst precincts, I sure would like to see how much he lost in his best precincts.

as much as i wish there was a miscount, its way too late to do something like that now

If we can prove handily that Sen. Kerry won Florida, it adds to any effort one would make to pursuade electors to defect. If enough dirt comes out on Bush about this election, some of these electors may have buyers remorse. :) Long shot; I know. -G

Someone needs to look at the polling machine allocation for Democratic areas in Florida, as in this analysis of Columbus, OH. You'll find the same situation in Florida. This alone will show a John Kerry victory in any legitimate election.

Where would I find precinct-level data for polling machine allocation? Would it require an FOIA request?

You'll be amazed at what you will find out if you call up some of the SOEs around here. All you have to do is ask.

The analysis linked to in the original post uses an exact calculation for Union and Lafayette counties but then has to extrapolate for Suwannee County since the original counts weren't known for the Suwannee precincts that were counted.

But now we know the original counts for the 6 precincts plus early and absentee that were counted in Suwannee. If we redo the math the results are very different. Here it is:

Here are the tallies for Union County:

Bush original: 3396
Bush hand count: 3393 (-3)
Kerry original: 1251
Kerry hand count: 1272 (+21)
Net change: Kerry +24

Here are the tallies for Lafayette County:

Bush original: 2460
Bush hand count: 2452 (-8)
Kerry original: 845
Kerry hand count: 848 (+3)
Net change: Kerry +11

Here are the tallies for Suwannee County (precincts 01, 02, 05, 07, 12,15, absentee and early ballots)

Bush original: 6138
Bush hand count: 6140 (+2)
Kerry original: 2975
Kerry hand count: 2984 (+9)
Net change: Kerry +7

Net change for all 3 counties: Kerry +42

The net change for all 3 counties from the original article using extrapolation was Kerry +1243. The net change using the exact data is Kerry +42.

The reason this occurs is because the precincts selected to recount had very different percentages of votes for the two candidates than the whole county did and therefore the extrapolation was wildly skewed.

We may be stuck with * for 4 more years. The more the numbers show that he cheated the more he is discredited in terms of his "mandate". Just yesterday in Canada, he referrred to a poll - the election - as approving his foreign policy. We have to continue to scrutinize the numbers - all the numbers - for this reason and to show the fraud that took place so that the election process will be changed.

I love numbers! They are so pure! :)