You must be busy here - I am not being allowed to start a new thread for this new finding. I'll tag it on as relevant to this topic although it relates to Florida. To view the spread sheet that shows the specific suppresion of Dem votes in Broward, go to my post at the Bartcop forum and hit the link at the bottom of the post. It is in HTML format. Please use it for your own analysis and pass on to anyone and everyone who might care.
http://bartcopnation.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=2&topic_id=336528&mesg_id=336528&page=_______________________________________
Broward looks the most slanted of the e-touchcreen counties in Fla. The attached spread sheet divides the counties by machine type and poll winner in 2000. The turnout in Broward of registered voters was 66.7% in 2000 and 66.7% in 2004 - this strikes me as unlikely in view of how fired up people were.
Adjoining Collier county used the same machines and saw an increase of 38.2% in Rep votes while Broward saw a 37.1% gain in Rep votes. However, Broward had a 16.8% increase in Dem votes while Collier saw........ a 46.2% increase!
If Broward had seen the same vote swing as the neighboring county of Collier, that would have yielded and additional 140,000 votes for Kerry.
I felt this was highly suggestive of voter suppression, vote tampering or other shenanigans in Broward. I am even more convinced of this by this report I was emailed today:
Report on Florida by the following:
Libby AnkerRyan Centner
Jill Greenlee
Rachel Van Sickle-Ward
Spurred by the unwillingness of the broadcast media to report
voting problems during the 2004 election race, we want to alert our friends,
family and colleagues to the widespread voter suppression and
disenfranchisement that occurred in Broward County, Florida. We staffed the
emergency hotline for the Kerry Campaign Headquarters in Broward County from
late October through the election. All of us were devastated by the margin
of Bush's win in Florida, particularly since polls predicted the race would
be extremely close.
Many of the calls to our hotline were from voters who had
pressed the Kerry button on their electronic voting screen, only to have
Bush light up as the candidate they had chosen. In some cases, this would
happen repeatedly until about the 5th or 6th time the voter pressed Kerry
and eventually his name would light up. In other cases, the voters pushed
Kerry but were later asked to confirm their Bush vote.
We had calls about a road block, put up by the police at 7am on
Nov. 2, which blocked road access to two precinct locations in majority
black districts. There was no justification for the road block no
accident or crime scene or construction.
Many of our calls dealt with voter suppression, or
manipulation, of the Haitian population occurrences which seem too
numerous, and their targets too indefensible, as primarily poor,
first-time-voter, Creole-speaking refugees, to be anything but systemic. In
one example, a voter whose hands were bandaged could not press the
touch-screen himself; he asked the nonpartisan election official to press
Kerry for him, but the election official pressed Bush and sent his vote
immediately into the machine. Many, many others were denied the right to
vote and were not given provisional ballots, while others were refused
assistance at the polls, even though provisional ballots and voter
assistance are legal rights. Others were told they had already voted and
were turned away, although they had never voted previously. This latter
experience was a complaint not isolated to Haitians but also included other
surprised voters with no recourse except their word against that of the
Supervisor of Elections.
We spoke with hundreds of voters who were certain they had
registered to vote in the past 6 months, well before the October 18
deadline, but were not on the rolls. And those were just the people who had
the information to contact us. The local paper, citing the Supervisor of Elections office as
its source, told all people voting by absentee ballot that they could turn
in ballots by hand to any of its seven offices by 5pm on Tuesday, Nov. 2.
Every single one of those offices except one was closed on Tuesday.
We had numerous calls from voters on Nov. 2 whose precincts had
closed, yet the Supervisor of Elections office had given voters no
notification of the closure, and no notification of where to go to vote.
Thousands of people were likely disenfranchised because of inexcusable
mishaps such as this.
We had many calls from people who had been harassed by poll
workers, who were turned away without being allowed the right to vote
provisionally (another breech of voter rights). Other people were turned
away because the address on their driver's license did not match the address
on their voter registration card; again, this is in direct violation of
election law.
All of these problems do not even take into account the 58,000 absentee
ballots that had been "lost" by the Supervisor of Elections, in perhaps the
most Democratic county in the state, disenfranchising thousands of people
who were disabled, out of the country, or elderly and unable get to the
polls. These events, and many others, have been documented and also
reported to lawyers, but we fear they will not get the attention they
deserve. This is what we witnessed in just one county. We believe that
these voting irregularities raise serious concerns about the legitimacy of
the results in Florida, and more broadly, about the health of democracy in
this country. Please circulate this widely.
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