July 8, 2012

Stealing Elections through Manipulation of County Central Tabulators

I'm currently working with a publisher, Biting Duck Press, to publish a book (title as yet undetermined) on the corruption in our election system. We hope that it will help to make Americans more vigilant and concerned about the way our elections are run. I’ve drafted most of the book. I am posting large portions of it on DU, in the hope of stimulating discussion and obtaining useful feedback.

This post deals with manipulation of the vote count by county central tabulators. Nobody knows how frequently central tabulator mediated election fraud is used to steal elections in our country. The concept is very simple. Monitoring it and therefore preventing it should theoretically be very simple. Yet in the 2004 Presidential election it proved impossible to adequately investigate it. Why is it that we are unable to verify whether a county’s sum total of votes from its individual precincts equals the county’s total votes?


Introduction to central tabulator mediated fraud

Every Election Day, after precincts tabulate their vote count, they send the results to a central location in the county, where the votes for the whole county are tabulated. The central locations generally receive the counts electronically by modem, and they receive a whole bunch of physical evidence (tapes from individual voting machines, memory cards, provisional ballots, etc.) as well. The machine that tabulates the county-wide vote is often referred to as the county’s central tabulator. The central tabulator reports out the county-wide vote count, along with the vote count from each of the county’s precincts. These vote counts are referred to as “post-tabulator” vote counts, which constitute the official vote count for the county, using processes that vary from state to state. These processes can be quite complicated, as indicated by an article from Verified Voting, which explains how people can monitor the tabulation process.

The vote count that each precinct sends in to the central tabulator is referred to as the “pre-tabulator” vote count. These vote counts should be posted at each precinct after the vote is tabulated. Obviously, the pre-tabulator vote count and the post-tabulator vote count for every precinct should be the same. If not, then something is wrong, since there is no legitimate reason why a vote count should change after a precinct sends its supposedly final count to the central tabulator.

Central tabulator mediated fraud may involve vote-switching, but it may not involve vote-switching. For example, if a central tabulator simply adds votes in the same proportion as the real votes to a heavily Republican voting precinct, that will help the Republican candidate even though his percentage of votes in that precinct will not change. Or, the same effect will occur if votes are subtracted from a Democratic voting precinct.


Reasons why central tabulator mediated election fraud may be more practical than vote switching on individual electronic machines

Though millions of people believe that the 2004 presidential election was stolen, I doubt that anyone but the perpetrators know precisely how it was done; nor does anyone know precisely why exit polls in 2006 predicted a much larger Democratic Congressional victory than the official election results indicated. More important, nobody knows what mechanisms of election fraud will be perpetrated in future elections.

But there are reasons, I believe, to think that central tabulator mediated fraud is a more practical way to influence a national election than is programming vote switching for individual voting machines. Few voting machines register much more than 100 votes per machine. So consider how many individual voting machines would have to be rigged to change the results of a presidential election.

County central tabulators, on the other hand, tabulate the results for a whole county, which in large counties may account for a million or more votes. So you’d have to rig the results of ten thousand individual voting machines to achieve the impact of rigging the results of a single large county central tabulator.

Another advantage of using central tabulators over individual machines to electronically rig the vote is that it is easier to cover up the statistical manipulations. When individual machines are relied upon to rig the vote, statistical anomalies are generally produced, showing up as big spikes for the favored candidate in selected precincts (unless voting machine rigging is evenly distributed over the whole county). Using central tabulators, a computer program can be written to make the theft evenly distributed over the whole county, thereby hiding the statistical manipulation in the event that statistical analyses are performed to search for evidence of election fraud.


Evidence of central tabulator mediated election fraud in recent elections

2004 Ohio Presidential election – Cleveland
As Election Day 2004 approached it became clear that Ohio was the most important key to victory for either presidential candidate. Hopes were running high in the Kerry camp because of reports of massive increases in voter registration in Cleveland, the most Democratic area of the state. These hopes were further encouraged by reports of very high voter turnout all over the state, especially in highly Democratic areas such as Cleveland, as well as the Ohio exit poll, which was trending heavily for Kerry. I later spoke with one of Kerry’s Ohio campaign workers, who told me that at the time the polls closed in Ohio, he and his fellow campaign workers were certain that Kerry had won. Exhausted from their days of continuous work, many went to bed that night thinking it was all over.

Very long voting lines in Cleveland
To verify the anecdotal reports of very high voter turnout in Cleveland on Election Day, I looked at data from the national Electronic Incident Reporting System (EIRS), which received tens of thousands of Election Day reports of voting complaints. This database contained 1,509 complaint reports involving long voting lines. Of these, more than a third, 548, came from Ohio. Of those, more than a quarter – 150 cases – came from Cuyahoga County, and of those Cuyahoga County reports which mention the name of the city, 46 of 75 reports were from Cleveland. Therefore, Cleveland accounted for about 6% of complaint reports of long voting lines in the whole United States, compared to only a little more than a tenth of a percent of votes in the 2004 election.

Very low official voter turnout in Cleveland
Yet despite the very long voting lines reported all over Cleveland, official voter turnout was not recorded as high. In fact, it was quite low compared to elsewhere in Ohio. According to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections website, the voter turnout percent in Cleveland was in the low 50s, compared to about 70% in the rest of Ohio. This finding had been earlier reported by Richard Hayes Phillips, a statistical expert in identifying statistical anomalies, whose findings have been widely publicized. Phillips had stated that there were at least 30 precincts in Cleveland with inexplicably low voter turnout, ranging as low as 7.1%. These findings translated into a voter turnout in Cleveland of 51%.

Why the very long voting lines in the presence of very low official voter turnout?
One theoretical reason why a city can have a very “low voter turnout” despite long voting lines is that insufficient voting machine allocation causes large numbers of voters to leave the voting lines because they couldn’t afford to wait for hours to vote. This is in fact what happened in Franklin County in 2004, which was allocated insufficient numbers of electronic voting machines (See Chapter 6). But Cuyahoga County used punch card voting in 2004, not electronic voting. According to data used to produce the Democratic National Committee report (Section IV, page 3) on the 2004 Ohio Presidential election, only counties that used electronic voting were characterized by long lines caused by too few voting machines. Counties that used either optical scan voting or punch card voting did not experience that problem. In Ohio as a whole, voter turnout was strongly related to the ratio of machines per voter – because of the problem posed by too few voting machines. However, this was not the case in Cuyahoga County, which did not use electronic voting machines.

To obtain some better insight into this perplexing issue I looked at the other Ohio counties that reported lots of complaints of long lines and that used punch cards for voting. Other than Cuyahoga, there were only two such counties that were characterized by 10 or more reports. Not including the 150 reports from Cuyahoga County, of the Ohio complaint reports that involved long voting lines, 61 came from those two counties – Summit (49 reports) and Hamilton (12 reports). So, what kind of turnout was reported in these other punch card counties that were characterized by complaints of long voting lines? Summit had 76.4% turnout, and Hamilton had 75.5% turnout. Furthermore, of the other 8 Ohio counties that reported any long voting lines to the EIRS database, all 8 had over 70% turnout.

To summarize the quandary: Without the explanation of too few voting machines as a plausible explanation for the long voting lines in Cleveland, the most plausible remaining explanation is an exceptionally high turnout. This explanation is consistent with the massive efforts that went into obtaining a high voter turnout in Cleveland, as well as wide-spread observations of long voting lines on Election Day. And yet, official voter turnout in Cleveland on Election Day was exceptionally low, rather than exceptionally high.

What would explain a very high real turnout of voters in Cleveland, in the presence of a very low official turnout? That finding alone suggests foul play, since long voting lines should be associated with high voter turnout, not low voter turnout. And since Cleveland is a very heavily democratic city with over three hundred thousand registered voters, the potential for massive fraud is obvious. More specifically, votes from Cleveland precincts could have been deleted by the Cuyahoga County central tabulator after being reported there. This would have caused the apparent voter turnout from these counties to be low, in spite of the widespread reporting of long voting lines in Cleveland.

Incomplete attempt to verify the vote count in Cleveland
Some people would say to me, in response to my voicing of my suspicions of central tabulator fraud in Ohio, that that kind of fraud was unlikely because it could be so easily proven by simply comparing the pre-tabulator to the post-tabulator vote count, to see if they matched.

Because I was very suspicious of this, I tried to ascertain whether or not the pre-tabulator and post-tabulator vote counts for Cuyahoga County matched. The post-tabulator vote counts were published on the Cuyahoga county web-site, so that part was easy. I then requested the pre-tabulator vote counts from the Director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, Michael Vu. Though Vu repeatedly promised to obtain those for me, he never followed through.

Consequently, I collaborated on this issue with a computer science professional, Ron (last name withheld), who worked for Ray Beckerman’s Ohio Project. Ron’s initial audit of 15 precincts (out of 1458 in Cuyahoga County) showed the post-tabulator (official) vote count to be less than the pre-tabulator count, as indicated in the poll book summaries. The audit identified an apparent vote undercount of 163 votes that resulted in a net loss to the Kerry/Edwards ticket of 140 votes (almost all of that attributed to four precincts). Ron tried to proceed with a more thorough audit of the Cuyahoga County vote, but he ran into numerous technical problems, and he was never able to complete it.

2004 Presidential Election – Elsewhere in Ohio
Another county that likely involved central tabulator fraud was Warren County. That was the site of the infamous lockdown, which allowed Republican officials to tally the Warren County vote in private. Their initial excuse for disallowing any observers to watch the vote count was that they didn’t want interference with the counting process. Later, they changed that excuse to say that the FBI warned them of a terrorism alert of grade 10 on a 1 to 10 scale. That claim was later denied by the FBI, and county officials refused to name the FBI agent whom they claimed gave them the warning. Several months later I called Erica Solvig, the reporter who broke the story, in an attempt to find out more about what happened. She told me that she wasn’t at liberty to discuss it.

Yet the Warren County results continued to stand, and without any serious investigation. It also may be significant that this event occurred when it still looked very much as if Kerry would win Ohio. Bush picked up thousands of additional votes in Warren County, compared with his performance in the 2000 election against Al Gore, and the number of voters officially increased by 30% compared to the 2000 election. By the time the Warren County votes had been “counted”, victory had all but slipped away from the Kerry/Edwards ticket.

In Miami County, after 100% of precincts had reported, an additional 19,000 ballots were reported, giving Bush an additional vote margin of about 6,000 (in exactly the same percentage of the previous votes). What makes this additionally suspicious is that Miami County reported a 20.9% increase in turnout for 2004, compared to 2000, despite a gain in population of only 1.4%. Miami County reported the second largest vote gain for Bush of Ohio’s 88 counties (2nd to Butler County), compared to his performance in 2000. Furthermore, the final official voter turnout figure for Miami County, after the additional 19,000 ballots were added, was a highly suspect 98.55%.

2002 Alabama Governor’s race

Election night, November 5, 2002, Bay Minette, Alabama
Republican controlled Bay Minette is the county seat for Baldwin County, Alabama. In 2002, Baldwin County used optical scan machines to tabulate vote counts from paper ballots filled out by voters and fed into the machines. The paper ballots themselves were saved, which means that they were available for recounting in case of close or contested elections.

The machine tabulated results from each precinct in the country were recorded on individual “data packs”, which were picked up by sheriff deputies after the polls closed, and delivered to the Bay Minette Board of Elections, which then used a central tabulator to tabulate the county-wide vote count.

The initial vote count for Governor for Baldwin County, reported from the Bay Minette tabulator at 10:45 p.m., was quite surprising to say the least. It reported: Riley (R) 30,142, Siegelman (D) 11,820, and the Libertarian candidate, John Sophocleus, 13,190. Although it was expected that Siegelman would lose Baldwin County, the margin of the loss was not believable, as he had lost Baldwin County in the Governor’s race in 1998 by only a little over four thousand votes. Furthermore, the idea of his losing to the Libertarian candidate was not plausible.

So, “someone” from the sheriff’s office went into the tabulation room to look into the matter and returned a few minutes later, announcing that the problem had been fixed. The new totals, which were reported at 11:04 p.m. and picked up and distributed by the AP, were: Riley 31,052, Siegelman 19,070, and Sophocleus a much more reasonable 937. The pickup of 7,250 votes by Siegelman was enough to give him a slim state-wide victory.

But two minutes later, at 11:06 p.m., the results were changed again, reducing Siegelman’s total back down to 12,736, a decrease of 6,334 votes, which gave the election back to Riley. William Pfeifer, the Baldwin County Chairman of the Democratic Party, was just outside the tabulating room at 11:04 when the second report, giving Siegelman the victory, was announced. But he didn’t find out about the reversal until he returned home and turned on the news.

Next morning, November 6, 2002, Bay Minette
The next morning, Pfeifer arrived at the probate court building in an attempt to speak with probate officials to find out what had happened. Pfeifer related his experience:

The board certified the election results a little after 10:30 a.m., and Riley gave his victory speech around 11:00 a.m.

Failed request for recount
Two days later, Pfeifer petitioned for a hand recount of the Baldwin County ballots. But Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor ruled later that day that the seals on the boxes containing the ballots could not be broken without a court order to do so. He claimed that his ruling was based on the Alabama Constitution. Don Siegelman contested the ruling and continued to seek a recount, which may have been the reason that he was framed for bribery and sent to prison, as testified to by Dana Jill Simpson:


In an apparently unrelated incident, Bill Pryor was appointed to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals by George W. Bush during a Congressional recess in 2004.

Statistical anomalies
It is worth noting that when the original computer error was identified, which resulted in adjusting Siegelman’s vote upwards from 11,820 to 19,070 and reducing the Libertarian candidate’s vote downward from an implausible 13,190 to 937, there were also five other races that had to be re-adjusted at the same time. But when the third and final report was issued, the totals in those five other races remained at what they had been adjusted to, while Siegelman’s vote total was the only one that was re-adjusted (downwards).

I’ve already noted that Siegelman’s vote total in 2002 in Baldwin County was totally out of line with what would be expected from his performance in 1998.

James H. Gundlach, a professor of sociology at Auburn University, performed an analysis of the data and concluded that someone with a wireless connection must have changed the tallies. He presented his analysis at the 2003 annual meeting of the Alabama Political Science Association in a paper titled "A Statistical Analysis of Possible Electronic Ballot Box Stuffing". In that paper Gundlach emphasized the reduction in Siegelman’s vote count from 19,070 to 12,736, saying that such a dramatic decrease is:


Columbia national election 1998
An intriguing example of how an apparent case central tabulator mediated election fraud was thwarted in mid-stream comes from Ingrid Betancourt’s “Until Death Do Us Part – My struggle to Reclaim Columbia”. Betancourt was running for Senator as a third party candidate, for the Oxygen Party, which she had just recently founded, in the Columbia national elections of 1998. A victory for her or her party in that election posed a great threat to the status quo powers of the country.

After viewing the initial returns, which appeared to show a clear and very surprising victory for her, and experiencing momentary elation, she goes on:


Betancourt went on to win a resounding victory and become a first term Senator. A month later she was told by employees who worked in the Registrar’s office that about 42 thousand votes were stolen from her on Election Day. She notes that if she had not gone up to the Registrar’s office that day she might have lost the election.


Solutions: Identifying central tabulator-mediated fraud early

In theory, monitoring for central tabulator-mediated fraud should be very simple. A county’s central tabulator totals up the votes for every precinct in the county. A precinct’s total vote counts for each race are typically posted at the precinct for a designated period of time after the polls close. If one has access to the pre-tabulator vote counts at each precinct (the counts posted by each precinct after poll closing), all one has to do is add up all the pre-tabulator precinct counts or simply compare the pre-tabulator precinct counts with the post-tabulator precinct counts to see if they match. If they do not match, and especially if the central tabulator count favors one candidate more than the sum of all the pre-tabulator precinct counts, that means that there is something very wrong with the way that the central tabulator counted up its totals. The concept can be visualized as follows:

Precinct 1 count + precinct 2 count + ….. + precinct N count = central tabulator count (also known as “post-tabulator count” or the official vote count).

The post-tabulator counts are easy to identify, since they are the official counts and are posted on the county Board of Elections web site as soon as the results become official. The pre-tabulator counts are more difficult to obtain. Because of the difficulties I had obtaining those counts following the 2004 Presidential election (in my attempt to verify the accuracy of the vote count in Cuyahoga County) I spoke with Ellen Theisen of Voters Unite! about her experiences with this issue. She told me that persons interested in investigating the 2004 election were having a hell of a time trying to get pre-tabulator vote counts from anywhere in the country.

Thus, it appears that within weeks or days following the 2004 Presidential election, many of the pre-tabulator vote counts either disappeared, or else county Boards of elections simply refused to make them available to enquiring citizens – as my experience with Michael Vu demonstrated. Apparently there was no systematic nation-wide effort in 2004 (or any other year) by election protection organizations to obtain pre-tabulator vote counts for President throughout the country.

This raises several questions: How difficult would it be for election integrity organizations to obtain those counts throughout the nation on Election Day or later? In how many precincts throughout the country are the pre-tabulator counts not posted – either because the law doesn’t require it, or because election officials choose to ignore the law? If election integrity organizations could show a discrepancy between the pre-tabulator counts and the central tabulator (post-tabulator) counts, what legal bearing would that information have on the election results if fraud was suspected? Can election officials be required to provide pre-tabulator counts days, weeks, or months following an election, if requested by concerned citizens? If so, how could it be determined whether that information was accurate?

In the absence of answers to all these questions, I can only suggest the following: Election integrity organizations should be able to obtain accurate pre-tabulator vote counts in all precincts, and should actually do so, as a check against central tabulator-medicated election fraud. Where state or local law doesn’t allow for this, federal law should require it.

If we could do that, it would then be possible to spot central tabulator fraud almost immediately after a county announces its official results. In a close election, the election may not have even been called by then. Indentifying situations where a county’s official vote count fails to reflect the sum total from its individual precincts (i.e. where there are substantial mismatches between pre-tabulator and post-tabulator vote counts) should signal a high likelihood of election fraud. In any county where that occurs in a close race, automatic hand recounts should be required. With that kind of evidence in hand, it could immediately be made available to the candidate, who would then be a fool to concede the election if the mismatch between pre-tabulator and official (post-tabulator) vote counts seemed great enough to alter the results of the election. Such a scenario very likely could have prevented John Kerry from conceding in 2004, and very well could have altered the results of that election.

July 6, 2012

So Many Ways to Make Votes Disappear

I'm currently working with a publisher, Biting Duck Press, to publish a book (title as yet undetermined) on the corruption in our election system. We hope that it will help to make Americans more vigilant and concerned about the way our elections are run. I’ve drafted most of the book. I am posting large portions of it on DU, in the hope of stimulating discussion and obtaining useful feedback.

In Chapter 3, "Can You Trust the Corporations that Make the Computers to Count Your Vote?", I began by discussing the hazards of “black box” voting (i.e. voting on electronic machines that produce vote counts that cannot be verified and have the potential to switch votes from one candidate to another) and presenting evidence of vote switching, in the 2004 and other elections. This post continues Chapter 3 by providing some examples of disappearing votes in U.S. elections.


SO MANY WAYS TO MAKE VOTES DISAPPEAR


Oval stickers to prevent Kerry votes being read – Clermont County, Ohio, 2004

Several volunteer workers participating in the recount in Clermont County shortly after the 2004 presidential election signed affidavits stating that they observed several white oval stickers covering the Kerry/Edwards choice on the optical scan ballots used in that election. Some of these workers noted that beneath the white oval stickers the Kerry/Edwards ovals were filled in. The white sticker would have prevented the optical scan machine from counting those ballots as votes for Kerry. None of these witnesses noted a problem with the Bush/Cheney ovals. Clermont County was one of the three Ohio counties with the largest vote increase for Bush from 2000 to 2004.


Votes disappearing on DRE machines – Florida District 13 U.S. House race, 2006

As explained by Paul Krugman in an article titled “When Votes Disappear”, the 2006 election for the U.S. House in Florida Congressional District 13, which was “won” by the Republican candidate by 369 votes, was almost certainly determined by faulty (whether intentional or not) DRE voting machines. In Sarasota County, which used ES & S voting machines, 15% of voters did not register a vote for the House race (these are termed ‘undervotes’), compared to 2.2% to 5.3% of voters who did not register a vote for the House race in neighboring counties. That amounted to almost 18,000 ballots that did not register a vote for the House race in Sarasota County. Furthermore, those who failed to cast a vote in the House race were shown by their other votes to strongly favor Democrats.

Why did 15% of the voters voting on ES & S machines in Sarasota County fail to vote for a House candidate? The answer to that question can be ascertained from an interview of voters by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, which found that one third of voters couldn’t find the House race on their ballot, and that 60% said that they did vote for a House candidate, but their vote didn’t show up on their summary page.


Unexplained undervotes – Florida District 24 U.S. House race, 2006

In the 2006 U.S. House election in Florida’s 24th District, Republican candidate Tom Feeney defeated Democratic candidate Clint Curtis by 16% of the vote, despite election eve polls that showed Feeney and Curtis to be in a statistical dead heat. An investigation into that election using door-to-door canvassing to interview voters demonstrated that Curtis received 12% to 24% more votes in every precinct canvassed than stated in the official election results. Sworn affidavits were used to document Curtis’ votes. Curtis’ research team was able to garner substantially more sworn affidavits – far more than needed to swing the election – from voters attesting that they voted for him than votes that were officially counted by the electronic voting machines in the election.


Disappearing Hispanic and Native American DRE machine votes – New Mexico, 2004

An extensive analysis of the 2004 Presidential vote in New Mexico demonstrated serious problems with electronic voting, with much higher undervote rates in Hispanic and Native American precincts than in Anglo precincts. In precincts using direct record electronic (DRE) voting in 2004, Hispanic and Native American precincts demonstrated undervote rates (for President) of 6.3% and 7.6%, respectively, compared to only 2.2% in Anglo precincts. In marked contrast, the average undervote rate was under 2% for each of the three ethnic groups in precincts using paper ballots in 2004, with no substantial difference by ethnic group. And, the undervote rate for governor in New Mexico in 2006, when all precincts used paper ballots, was under 2% for each of the three ethnic groups, again with no substantial difference by ethnic group. It is also important to note that if the DRE precincts in 2004 had had undervote rates comparable to the paper ballot precincts, John Kerry would have won New Mexico in 2004.

What could explain these findings? Why was the extremely high undervote rate confined to Hispanic and Native American precincts? Could that be explained by a propensity of these ethnic groups to voluntary decide, after going to their polling place to vote, not to cast a vote for president? No. If that were the case, Hispanic and Native American precincts that used paper ballots would have demonstrated a similar undervote rate. Instead, where paper ballots were used, the undervote rate was far lower, regardless of race or ethnicity. The only explanation that seems worth considering is that the DRE voting machines used in Hispanic and Native American precincts caused votes to disappear. Theoretically that could have been purposeful or accidental. But why did that occur only in Hispanic and Native American precincts?


Huge undervote rates on Diebold machines, Ohio Senate race, 2006

In connection with my role as a volunteer for the Election Defense Alliance, I conducted an analysis of the undervote rate in the 2006 Ohio race for U.S. Senate. An undervote for the purpose of that analysis was defined as a ballot that was cast, but for which there was no vote registered for Senator.

The state-wide undervote rate for Ohio Senator was 3.9%. But there was a great difference in undervote rate by county and machine type, with the Diebold counties averaging a significantly higher undervote rate (4.8%) than counties using the other machines (3.2% for counties using Votronic DREs, 3.3% for counties using optical scan systems).

Furthermore, there were six counties that were definite and extreme outliers (all Diebold) compared to the other counties. Those six counties (Mercer, Darke, Highland, Montgomery, Adams, Perry) had undervote rates ranging from 11.2% to 16.3%, with an average of 13.8%, while the other 82 Ohio counties had undervote rates ranging from 0.6% to 6.8%, with an average of 3.4%. The undervotes in the six outlier counties amounted to almost a quarter of the undervotes in the whole state, whereas the total votes in those six counties amounted to only 7.1% of the total votes in the state. Without those six counties, the average undervote rate for the other 41 Diebold counties was quite similar to the average undervote rate for the other types of machines.

Another finding of note is that a previous similar analysis of the unofficial Ohio data by Richard Hayes Phillips resulted in findings that were substantially different than my analysis of the official Ohio Senate data (though our general conclusion of high undervote rates in several Diebold counties was similar). This means that in some respects there were major changes in the data from the time of the first unofficial postings to the time that the official results were posted.

What explains the very high rate of undervotes in the six Diebold counties? It seems highly likely that there was something wrong with the Diebold machines, at least a good portion of them, in six Ohio counties, which caused the relatively high undervote rates. That could have been due to difficulties voters had in finding the Senate candidates on those Diebold machines, or it could have been due to failure of the machines to record the votes that the voters intended. Alternatively, it could have been due to the fact that 11% to 16% of voters in six Ohio counties decided not to vote for Senator – but no reasonable explanation comes to mind to explain why that would happen in six Diebold counties and not in other counties.


Why use so many different methods to steal elections?

As I document in my book, the powers that be have used numerous different methods to steal elections in recent years: Electronic machines that count our votes using secret software and produce unverifiable results; ballot tampering, as noted in the first example in this post; illegal voter purging; dirty tricks such as pamphlets distributed to poor neighborhoods telling voters to vote on different days or different places than when and where they are supposed to vote; intimidation; insufficient allocation of voting machines to Democratic precincts, and; sham recounts to cover-up their fraud.

Why so many different methods? If they used only one method a pattern would likely emerge, and it would be easier to expose them. Anyhow, they have nothing of value to offer 99% of American citizens, so who would vote for them in a fair and honest election? The more methods they use the more votes they can get in their effort to overcome the fact that so few people really like what they have to offer.

July 5, 2012

Can You Trust the Corporations that Make the Voting Machines to Count Your Vote?

I'm currently working with a publisher, Biting Duck Press, to publish a book (title as yet undetermined) on the corruption in our election system. We hope that it will help to make Americans more vigilant and concerned about the way our elections are run. I’ve drafted most of the book. I am posting large portions of it on DU, in the hope of stimulating discussion and obtaining useful feedback.

Chapter 2, "Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen Too?", began by discussing the large discrepancies between the exit polls (which favored John Kerry) and the official vote count (which gave the election to George W. Bush) in the 2004 Presidential election. This discrepancy raised the strong suggestion that votes might have been switched electronically from Kerry to Bush. Chapter 3, “Can You Trust the Corporations that Make the Computers to Count Your Vote?”, follows up on that suggestion by discussing the hazards of “black box” voting (i.e. voting on electronic machines that produce vote counts that cannot be verified and have the potential to switch votes from one candidate to another) and presenting more substantial evidence of vote switching, in the 2004 and other elections.


The hazards of using Direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines to register and count our votes

Direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines are those that directly record the voter’s vote electronically, without the necessity for any paper evidence of the vote.
What do you think would be the reaction of most U.S. citizens if they were told that a law had just been passed that gave the Party in power the right to count the votes and determine the winner of elections in private – without any oversight? Outrage, I would hope. And yet, today we find ourselves in a situation where votes are counted by computer software that is written in secret and made inaccessible to the public, with the rationale that the machines and software that count our votes are “proprietary”. Just as bad, they leave no record of the vote counting process, making recounts impossible. These systems are often referred to as ‘black box voting’, to emphasize the fact that the voting process employed by them is opaque. Is that situation different than giving one Party a box of paper ballots and allowing them to count them and determine the winner in private? And yet, where is the outrage?

Involvement of voting machine companies in our political process
The corporations that make the computers and software that count our votes often donate money to political candidates, including those who could potentially benefit if the election machinery is programmed to help them win elections. They sometimes employ convicted felons. And nobody questions the fact that it is possible to secretly program their computers to rig an election. An important question is, “Is that what actually happened in the 2004 Presidential election?”

According to a report by electionline.org on campaign donations by voting machine companies:

Why DRE machines are unfit to be used in our elections
A book by Andrew Gumbel, “Steal this Vote”, talks at great length about why DRE machines in the U.S. today are unfit to count our votes. Here is a general statement by Gumbel as to why these machines should not be used in our elections:


Gumbel then goes on to discuss how the Florida Task Force recommended that optical-scan machines are a much preferred alternative:


He then goes on to discuss how, due to Republican control of the state and a cozy relationship between ES&S and state officials, the Task Force recommendations were largely ignored, and touch screen machines were sold to twelve Florida counties. Similar events transpired in Maryland and Georgia.

Then, on National Bureau of Standards identification of DRE problems:


Gumbel talks about how Bev Harris came upon files of code for Diebold machines on the internet. Harris copied these files and made them available to computer scientists, so that they could examine the files and ascertain their potential. Here is what Avi Rubin and his associates at Johns Hopkins University found:


Gumbel notes that many of Diebold’s internal e-mails were leaked. Some made a big point of the need for them (Diebold) to have access to vote counting codes from outside during an election. He notes that there is great resistance of at least some DRE manufacturers to include auditable paper trails (i.e. where voters are given a paper receipt that denotes their vote, which they deposit in a ballot box for a later potential recount) in an election. Both of these things – access to the machines from outside during an election and the absence of paper trails – are recipes for election theft. Allowing access to the machines from outside during an election facilitates electronic manipulation of the vote. The absence of paper trails precludes the possibility of a recount of the vote. We should ask why voting machine companies insist on these things, and why they are allowed in our elections.


Evidence of vote switching

One of the scariest aspects of the DRE machines is the potential to switch votes from one candidate to another. There is much evidence that this occurs. Let’s consider some of this evidence.

An analysis of nation-wide vote switching reported by voters during the 2004 election
In order to assess the potential role of vote switching in the 2004 presidential election, I conducted an analysis of reports by U.S. voters to the Election Incidence Reporting System (EIRS) developed by the National Election Data Archive Project. All reports included in this analysis involve the U.S. national election of November, 2004. The EIRS database included 28,734 reported incidents, including 2,115 “machine problem” incidents. The material for this analysis was obtained by searching these “machine problem” incidents only in counties that used electronic voting machines, according to a database provided by Voters Unite!.

A report was categorized as a presidential vote switching incident if: 1) the report specifically referred to the presidential vote OR to one or both of the two major parties (unless referring specifically and only to non-presidential candidates); and 2) The report noted that the voting machine made it easier or more difficult to vote for one of the two major candidates. Typically these reports involved a voter attempting to register a vote for one candidate, and then the machine noting that another candidate has been selected. These “vote switches” involved switches from one to the other major party candidate, from a major party to a 3rd party candidate, or vice versa.

Results
The analysis showed 87 cases where the vote switch favored Bush and 7 where it favored Kerry – a 12 to 1 ratio in favor of Bush.

Of the 87 vote switches that favored Bush, 67 were reported from one of the 11 battleground states. The rate of these reports (per voter using electronic voting machines) from the battleground states was 9 times greater than in the other 39 states. The distribution of incidents by state and county was very uneven. Of the 67 vote switches reported from swing states, all were reported from four states: Florida (47 incidents), Ohio (8 incidents), New Mexico (8 incidents), and Pennsylvania (4 incidents)

Four voting machine vendors accounted for all but three of the 87 reported incidents that were favorable to Bush. These included Diebold, Danaher, Sequoia, and ESS. The rate of reported incidents was more than 5 times greater with touch screen machines than with other electronic voting machines.

Many of the voters who experienced vote switches from Kerry to Bush tried to vote for Kerry several times before the correct vote finally registered. Three voters said they ended up voting for Bush because they lost patience trying to change their vote. 24 of the reports noted that there were numerous additional reports of similar incidents in the same polling place, which used phrases such as “happening all day”.

Most of the reports did not specify precisely how the vote switch took place, although one gets the impression from reading many of these reports that the vote switch often took place immediately after the voter registered his/her vote, and that it was immediately apparent. On the other hand, 15 reports specifically noted that they were not aware of the switch until the end, when they checked the “review” or “summary” screen, or when they tried to “confirm” their vote. One of these voters noted that the switch on the summary screen took place right before her eyes as she was registering her vote, which meant that she accidentally voted for Bush. Several voters noted that the vote switch was difficult to identify, and only their watchfulness prior to registering their vote prevented them from voting for Bush.

Discussion of the results
What is the meaning of the voter reported incidents of vote switching that favored George W. Bush over John Kerry by a ratio of more than 12 to 1? Let’s examine the possibilities:

Statistical analysis showed that the odds against random chance (like flipping a coin and getting 87 heads and 7 tails) accounting for the large preponderance of vote switches favoring Bush over Kerry exceed ten million to one. So there is no reasonable probability that random chance explains the degree to which Bush was favored by these vote switches.

Bias would explain the disproportionate percent of cases favoring Bush if in reality the Bush and Kerry favorable incidents occurred with approximately the same frequency, but the Bush favorable incidents were more likely to be reported by the voters who experienced them. This possibility is similar to the hypothesis posed by Warren Mitofsky to explain the discrepancy between his November 2004 Presidential exit poll (which had Kerry winning by 3 %) and the official election results (which had Bush winning by 2.4%). Although I don’t find it difficult to believe that such a bias could exist, I do find it very difficult to believe that the magnitude of such a bias could be so great as to result in a 12 to one ratio. I can’t say it’s not possible. But it seems like a very unlikely explanation. Why would Kerry voters be so much more concerned about vote switches than Bush voters?

The remaining possibility is that there were many voting machines throughout the country for which it was more difficult to vote for Kerry than for Bush (or which switched or attempted to switch votes from Kerry to Bush), that such occurrences greatly outnumbered problems in the opposite direction, and that these machines were concentrated in certain areas of the country.

Vote switching on electronic machines can be accidental. But if they were accidental, then why would the vast majority of these incidents tend to favor one candidate over the other? And furthermore, why would the incidents be concentrated so heavily in battleground states? I cannot think of an explanation for how this could have happened accidentally.

If the tendency of these voting machines to favor Bush was not accidental, that means that someone programmed them to act this way. Depending on the magnitude of this phenomenon, that could have compromised the integrity of the election. This is especially true given the fact that Florida and Ohio were the two states where this problem was reported with the greatest frequency, and the fact that if either if these states had gone for Kerry, he would have won the election.

If voting machines used in the 2004 Presidential election were in fact programmed to make it more difficult to vote for Kerry than for Bush, or to switch votes from Kerry to Bush, what significance could that have had to the integrity or outcome of the election? 87 individual incidents of vote switching in an election involving more than a hundred million voters doesn’t seem like very much. But what if these 87 incidents represent only the tip of an iceberg – the known part of a much larger problem? Let’s consider some possibilities that would suggest that a much larger problem exists than these 87 reports.

No one knows what fraction of problems discovered by voters at the polls in November, 2004, were reported to the EIRS. It seems likely that the great majority of voters weren’t even aware that the system existed. Or even if they were aware of it, most people just don’t feel the necessity of taking the time to report such things.

A typical report noted that a voter would attempt to register a choice for President (or other candidate), and then prior to finalizing their choice would note that the screen registered a vote for the other candidate. How many voters would have noticed this, and how many voters would have failed to notice it, and therefore cast their vote for the other candidate?

If the machines were programmed to switch votes, the person(s) behind this crime would not have wanted the machines to register any visual evidence to that effect, thus enabling the voter to have a chance to correct the problem, or bring it to the attention of election officials, and potentially a much wider audience. But what if it was not possible to program the machines in such a way that they wouldn’t occasionally provide this evidence, or what if doing so would have required a level of skill that many of the programmers didn’t have? The bottom line is that it is possible that the great majority of vote switching went unnoticed, uncorrected, and unreported.

Other investigations have been conducted that strongly support the idea that the EIRS reports represent only the tip of an iceberg:

First there is a report by Paul Lehto and Jeffrey Hoffman that identified 19 reports of electronic vote switching in Snohomish County, Washington – all which favored Bush – from the Washington State auditor’s office, the Washington Secretary of State’s office, and a Snohomish County voter complaint hotline. This compares with only three reports made to EIRS.

Even more compelling is an investigation undertaken by the Washington Post regarding electronic vote switching in Mahoning County, Ohio. This investigation identified 25 electronic voting machines in Youngstown, Mahoning County, each which transferred an unknown number of votes from Kerry to Bush. The Post report goes on to state “Due to lack of cooperation from Secretary of State Blackwell, we have not been able to ascertain the number of votes that were impacted or whether the machines malfunctioned due to intentional manipulation or error.”

Supporting the supposition of election fraud as an explanation for the vote switches described in the EIRS analysis, as well as the exit poll discrepancy nationally and in Ohio, sworn testimony of computer programmer Clint Curtis before the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic staff (which I will discuss in detail in chapter 4) suggests an intention on the part of Republican functionaries to utilize electronic vote switching software in the 2004 election. The strange "suicide" death of the Florida investigator who was in the midst of investigating Curtis’ allegations (after telling Curtis that his investigation revealed corruption “all the way to the top”) provides additional reason to believe that the implications of Curtis’ revelations were very important.

Nobody knows how many votes the electronic vote switching described in this article cost John Kerry. Clearly, these are issues that should be thoroughly investigated and widely publicized to the American people. The implicated voting machines should have been analyzed by the relevant experts in order to determine why they malfunctioned. Attempts to do this since 2004 met with objections by the voting machine companies to the effect that their machines are “proprietary” and therefore legally immune to government confiscation and analysis. I don’t understand how that argument can be given any serious consideration in a democracy, where failure to ensure the integrity of our voting machines is tantamount to failure to ensure the integrity of our elections.

Georgia, 2002 – Senate and Governor race
The elections for U.S. Senate and Governor in Georgia in 2002 were conducted entirely on unauditable DRE machines. Both races resulted in huge upsets for the Republican candidate. Andrew Gumbel says about this election:


Bev Harris writes about her investigation:


Exit poll discrepancy in the 2008 Presidential election
On Election Day 2008, the Election Defense Alliance undertook an effort to capture exit poll statistics from all major statewide races (President, Senator, and Governor) prior to “correction” of the statistics to match the official election results (Once the statistics are “corrected” to match the official election results they are worthless for the purpose of assessing the exit poll discrepancy because the “correction” erases the discrepancy.) Barack Obama won the national popular vote in that election by 6.1%, whereas the national exit poll predicted an Obama win of 8.3%. Thus, the exit poll discrepancy from the official vote count (‘red shift’) in this election was 2.2% -- much smaller than the red shift of 5.4% found in the 2004 Presidential election.

Why was the red shift in the 2008 Presidential Election so much less than that seen in 2004? Nobody knows, and we can only speculate. Maybe it had to do with the fact that those in a potential position so steal an election in 2008 recognized that this particular election was being watched very closely for signs of election theft. Maybe they realized that Obama had a large enough lead in this election to make it too difficult to steal. Maybe they did not consider Obama as much of a threat to them as john Kerry. Nobody knows.

Whatever the reason, monitoring of elections with exit polls needs to be continued. Exit polling is considered a standard tool for monitoring elections, and it is especially important when vote counts are conducted electronically, with no paper trail. There is a good reason for this: Large discrepancies between exit polls and official vote counts provide an important warning sign regarding the integrity of elections.

July 3, 2012

Corrupted Ohio Recount in the 2004 Presidential Election

I'm currently working with a publisher, Biting Duck Press, to publish a book (title as yet undetermined) on the corruption in our election system. We hope that it will help to make Americans more vigilant and concerned about the way our elections are run. I’ve drafted most of the book. I am currently intending to post large portions of it on DU, in the hope of stimulating discussion and obtaining useful feedback.

Chapter 2, "Was the 2004 Election Stolen Too?", deals with some of the initial evidence for a stolen election. This post concludes Chapter 2 with a discussion of the corrupted recount in Ohio and a summary of some of the initial evidence for a stolen 2004 Presidential election.


A corrupted recount in Ohio

A hand recount of the vote can theoretically be a last line of defense against machine error, accidental or purposeful, in the counting of votes – assuming that there is a “paper trail” to count. For example, optical scan voting machines leave paper trails – ballots with filled in ovals adjacent to the candidate’s name. Punch card voting machines leave paper trails – ballots with holes punched out (or at least some evidence of an attempt to punch a hole) adjacent to the candidates name. Some electronic voting machines also are made to leave paper trails, but there can be serious problems with those (See Chapter 3). But many electronic voting machines leave no paper trail at all. In those cases, it is not possible to perform a hand recount of the vote because there is nothing to count.

But even when hand recounts are performed, the system can be rigged to make them ineffectual. Such was the case in the Presidential election of 2004 in Ohio, under the direction of Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who simultaneously served as the Bush/Cheney campaign Chairman in Ohio.

Because of the numerous suspicions surrounding the election in Ohio, an assurance to the citizens of this country that fraud played no major role in the outcome of this election should have been based on a full investigation. A fair, lawful and transparent recount of the votes, consistent with Ohio law, would be the first step in this process, and money was soon raised for such a recount. The law required that 3% of randomly selected precincts from each county be selected for an initial recount, and then if the recounted vote totals from those randomly selected precincts did not match the initial count of the respective precincts, the whole county would be recounted by hand.

Numerous irregularities in the Ohio recount
Yet from start to finish, every effort was made to prevent full county recounts, as described in a review by Georgia10, so that when it all ended, only one county in the whole state had been recounted. In order to accomplish this, numerous violations of Ohio law were perpetrated, including: At least 17 counties where the precincts to be recounted were chosen by Ohio election officials rather than by a randomization process; at least 6 counties where tampering with the tabulating machines by voting machine company technicians was confirmed, including a case in Hocking County where the technician actually gave the election officials a "cheat sheet" with instructions on how to make the counts match (The whistle blower of this felony, Sherole Eaton, was subsequently fired from her job), and; at least 6 counties for which, even when it turned out that the vote totals from the recount didn’t match the official count, election officials still refused to do the required recount.

And to top it all off, when workers were attempting to examine records during the recount in order to identify discrepancies, Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell issued a surprise order stating that the public voting records were now private rather than public, and disallowed access to them – contrary to Ohio law. Then, when Congressman John Conyers’ U.S. House Judiciary Democratic Staff attempted to question Blackwell about this and numerous other violations of Ohio law, Blackwell repeatedly refused to answer any questions of the Committee, as described in the Committee's landmark report, "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio?"

Convictions in Cuyahoga County
Cuyahoga County (containing Cleveland) was of particular concern, as there was much evidence suggesting that that county’s officially reported vote totals were wrong. One good way to find out if votes were deleted by the Cuyahoga County central tabulator would be to compare the individual precinct totals, as reported by precincts prior to being sent to the Cuyahoga County central tabulator (pre-tabulator results), with the official results reported after the central tabulator added up the votes in all the precincts (post-tabulator results).

I tried numerous times to obtain the pre-tabulator results from Michael Vu, the Executive Director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. He promised them to me several times, but he never delivered on his promises. Consequently, I collaborated on this issue with a computer science professional, Ron (last name withheld), who worked for Ray Beckerman’s Ohio Project. Ron’s initial audit of 15 precincts identified an apparent vote undercount of 163 votes that resulted in a net loss to the Kerry/Edwards ticket of 140 votes. Ron tried to proceed with a more thorough audit of the Cuyahoga County vote, but he ran into numerous technical problems, and he was never able to complete it.

There was also a “recount” of a 3% “random sample” of the Cuyahoga County votes. However, we now know that that recount appears to have been rigged. Three elections workers faced criminal charges for that, and at least two of them were convicted. As reported by The Free Press:

Additional evidence of a corrupted recount comes from the observations of an election observer representing the Green Party of Ohio at the recount, who noted:



Brief summary of initial evidence for a stolen Presidential election in 2004

More than anything else, it was the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official vote count (red shift), in conjunction with the fact that they each favored different candidates (Kerry favored by the exit polls, Bush favored by the official vote count), that initially generated widespread concern about a stolen presidential election. The fact that the hand recount in Ohio was never accomplished in the manner required by law except in one county adds greatly to the suspicions surrounding this election. The fact that ballots and election records from 56 of Ohio’s 88 counties were destroyed despite a federal order to preserve them substantially exacerbates that suspicion.

This chapter discussed initial evidence that pointed to a problem with election integrity as the major cause of the red shift. This initial evidence led to numerous investigations into the integrity of the 2004 election, which found a great amount of additional evidence for a stolen election. Chapters 3 through 7 discuss that additional evidence, as it pertains to the 2004 Presidential election, as well as to other elections.

June 30, 2012

Widespread National Silence about the Possibility of Election Fraud in 2004

I'm currently working with a publisher, Biting Duck Press, to publish a book (title as yet undetermined) on the corruption in our election system. We hope that it will help to make Americans more vigilant and concerned about the way our elections are run. I’ve drafted most of the book. I am currently intending to post large portions of it on DU, in the hope of stimulating discussion and obtaining useful feedback

In my last post, “Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen Too?”, I discussed the initial evidence that pointed to large scale election fraud in the Presidential election of 2004. Much more evidence of election fraud in 2004 will be covered in subsequent chapters of the book. This post discusses the widespread national silence about the question of election fraud in 2004.


WIDESPREAD NATIONAL SILENCE ABOUT THE QUESTION OF ELECTION FRAUD IN 2004

Unfortunately, our corporate owned national news media made every effort to silence talk of election fraud following the 2004 election – reminiscent of how they acted following the awarding of the 2000 Presidential election to George Bush by the U.S. Supreme Court. We were told to “move on” and accept it. Those who talked about election fraud were tagged with the epithet “conspiracy theorist” – as if concern about conspiracies to undermine our democracy is some kind of character defect. Consequently, even some of those who were honestly concerned about the integrity of our election system denied that election fraud had anything to do with the results of the 2004 Presidential election. Perhaps some of them were swayed to adopt this point of view by the reactions of our national news media. Perhaps others simply did not want to be tagged as “nut case conspiracy theorists”.

Why did our corporate communications media want to make talk of election fraud go away? The truth is that as our national communications media has become consolidated more and more into the hands of a small number of very wealthy individuals and corporations, it has become more and more conservative. They want to protect the status quo. If people question the foundations of our democracy they may want to take action to protect our democracy. Some of those actions may include efforts to reform our national communications media, which would infringe on the wealth and power of those who now control it.

This will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 12. For now, let’s consider how silencing of talk of election fraud in 2004 played out.


“Corrected” exit polls

The exit poll numbers discussed above were never broadcast on TV. It is only because of computer screen shots preserved by Jonathan Simon that the information is even available to those who have an interest in looking at it. Steven Freeman points out in his book, “Was the 2000 Presidential Election Stolen?”:

Nevertheless, there are a couple of very interesting pictures regarding the exit poll in Ohio, that appeared on CNN early on Wednesday morning, which are shown on pages 103 and 105 of Freeman’s book. At 12:21 a.m. on Wednesday morning, November 3, the final Ohio exit poll by gender appeared briefly on TV. It showed Kerry with a 2% lead over Bush among males and a 6% lead among females. But by 1:32 a.m. that picture was replaced by another final Ohio “exit poll”. That new “exit poll” showed Bush with 5% lead over Kerry among males and a statistical tie among females. That is perfectly consistent with the official election results in Ohio, which gave Bush a 2.5% lead over Kerry in Ohio. The “exit poll” shown at 1:32 a.m. was not really an exit poll at all. It was, rather, an exit poll that was “corrected” to conform to the official final vote count. Freeman points out that ‘adjusted’ would be a better word to describe it because the use of the word “corrected” implies that the exit poll was wrong and the official vote count was correct.

Many have suggested that the appearance of the 1:32 a.m. “corrected” exit poll on CNN, carrying the designation of “exit poll” without any explanation to the effect that it was a “corrected” exit poll (meaning it was not really an exit poll at all, in the generally understood sense of the term) is indicative of CNN’s attempt to lie to the American people to make them think that the exit polls actually predicted Bush to be the winner. I don’t quite buy that. But to be honest about it, and in the interest of being informative, a network news organization should not do that kind of thing. Even if their adjustment of the true exit poll findings to conform to the official vote count was done innocently to make the exit poll findings more “correct” as they see it, it certainly does not represent the actual exit poll findings. It is simply a depiction of the official vote count, with the exit poll being used to estimate the relative gender distribution of those who voted. If a TV network chooses to show such a picture, they should not label it as an “exit poll”, or at least they should explain what it means.

The bottom line is that such behavior is indicative of a knee jerk response, by news organizations who cover elections for us, to discrepancies between exit polls and official vote counts. That knee-jerk response is to assume that the discrepancy shows the exit polls, rather than the official vote count, to be faulty. The possibility that it is the official results rather than the exit polls that are faulty is simply not considered. That is a very shallow kind of news reporting at best.


Denial

Tom Brokaw – NBC News anchor
A quote on the subject by Tom Brokaw, NBC News anchor at the time, is symptomatic of the coverage of the subject by network news organizations:


Again, there appears to be no consideration of the possibility that the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official vote counts could have been due to election fraud. Brokaw is simply making the assumption that exit poll bias, rather than election fraud impinging on the official election results, was the problem.

What is the cause of this national silence on the issue of whether or not the 2004 election was stolen? Do those who determine the content of the news we receive believe that it would be bad for our country to discuss such an unpalatable subject? Do they feel that this would rock the status quo? Or do most people simply not want to contemplate such a terrible thing happening in our country? Whatever it is, the phenomenon seems to be rampant in our country. Even many of those who are very concerned about election integrity in our country seem to be aversive to talking or thinking about the subject of a stolen presidential election.

Douglas Schoen – political consultant and professional pollster
Douglas Schoen has been a Democratic campaign consultant for more than 30 years. He wrote a book titled “The Power of the Vote – Electing Presidents, Overthrowing Dictators and Promoting Democracy Around the World”, in which he gives numerous examples of how exit polls (or “quick counts”), combined with vote recounts when necessary helped to preserve democracy. Specifically, he explains how exit polls: proved decisive in removing Slobodan Milosevic from the Serbian presidency in 2000; helped to ensure a fair election in Mexico in 2000]; played a decisive role in electing Michael Bloomberg as Mayor of New York City in 2001; and led to the reversal of the official results of the Ukraine presidential election of 2004, thus elevating Viktor Yushchenko to the Ukrainian presidency.

In 2004 Schoen worked for Victor Yushchenko’s campaign for the presidency of the Ukraine. At the time of poll closing, official election results showed that the opposition candidate, Victor Yanukovich, had won by about 3%. However, an exit poll funded by Western embassies showed Yushchenko ahead by 11% -- a 14% discrepancy from the official results. Fueled by the exit poll results, thirty thousand pro-Yushchenko demonstrators filled downtown Kiev, thereby seizing control of the city. The Bush administration refused to acknowledge the results of the election, and the International Election Observation Mission determined the election to be flawed. Consequently, the government agreed to another round of voting, again overseen by exit polling, and that time Yushchenko won without further problem, with exit polls backing his claim to victory.

So, what does this great believer in the value of exit polls have to say about the substantial red shift in the 2004 Presidential election? Schoen dismisses this whole thing with a single phrase in his book, referring to it as an “exit poll debacle”. Yet, in all the other examples in his book he considers the exit polls to be a better reflection of voter intent than the “official” election results. Indeed, that’s why he advocates using exit polls as a check on the validity of elections. But in this one case, which I suspect is substantially more important to his readers than most of the other examples in his book, he dismisses the whole issue by referring to the exit poll discrepancy as an “exit poll debacle”, with no further explanation.

Americans would do well to give this issue very serious consideration. If exit polls and vote recounts have been shown to be of vital importance in protecting democracy in other countries, then shouldn’t we give them serious consideration in our own country, as tools to protect our democracy?

Andrew Gumbel – one of our first journalists to bring the dangers of computer voting to our attention
Another great example of this denial phenomenon is Andrew Gumbel’s “Steal this Vote”. This book is largely a scathing indictment of electronic touch screen voting machines. Gumbel makes the point that voting machines that are privately owned and use secret software to count votes have no legitimate place in a democracy. He also discusses the substantial amount of evidence that these machines were used in Georgia in 2002 to steal elections for the U.S. Senate and the governorship of Georgia.

But when it comes to the 2004 Presidential election he dismisses the possibility out of hand that these machines were used to hand the presidency to George W. Bush, and he denigrates those who seriously consider that possibility as “conspiracy theorists”. He says:


Well, that would be a terrific rebuttal to us “conspiracy theorists” IF one of our main arguments was that over 100,000 votes could “easily be created out of thin air by electronic tabulation machines”. I don’t think that many of us have claimed that it would be easy. To the contrary, we believe that Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio’s Secretary of State, had to work very hard to steal Ohio for Bush. And as far as Ohio being a state relying almost exclusively on re-countable paper ballots, the paper ballots were never re-counted and the tabulating of county-wide votes was performed by central computers. Furthermore, registration of new voters, and purging of voters was done electronically.

Gumbel also says that “Kerry did too well in certain areas to support any argument that his votes were suppressed” – implying here, I guess, that when votes are stolen in a state the thefts must be evenly distributed throughout the state.

Mark Blumenthal – professional pollster
A statement by the well known professional pollster Mark Blumenthal (commonly known as the ‘mystery pollster’) perhaps reveals the type of thinking that facilitates or justifies denial of the dangers to our election system even among highly educated people:


This line of reasoning is wrong on several accounts. First, the question posed by most people who are seriously concerned about the large red shift in the 2004 presidential election is not whether exit polls provide affirmative evidence that fraud occurred. It is whether or not the large red shift is a danger sign that tells us that we need to seriously question and investigate the possibility of election fraud. Second is Blumenthal’s statement of the concept of statistical inquiry. It is true that a general principle of science is that we should not assume a finding to be valid until it is proven. Though that is a general principle of statistics as used in science, statistics is not simply an abstract discipline. It needs to be applied to the realities of life. Proof of election fraud should not be required before action is taken. In fact, perhaps the opposite philosophy should apply to national elections to our highest offices: that they should not be accepted as valid until serious doubts about their validity have been thoroughly addressed. Similarly, Blumenthal’s analogy to the presumption of innocence in criminal law is way off base. It is true that we should not send people to jail or execute them until their guilt is proven. But neither should we award them the presidency of the United States until we have reasonably good evidence that the election results are correct.


Withholding of crucial data

On the issue of national silence regarding the possibility of election fraud, the repeated refusals to release the raw exit poll data to the public for analysis, despite myriad requests from a large variety of concerned citizens and organizations, deserves special mention and emphasis. In claiming that his data showed exit poll bias rather than election fraud, one of the points that Warren Mitofsky repeatedly brought up was that nobody else was in a position to make any definitive conclusions on the question because they did not (and could not) analyze the raw exit poll data. That was precisely the reason for the many requests for the data – although certainly tentative conclusions could be reached on the basis of the publicly available data.

Let’s not blame Mitofsky for his repeated refusals to release the raw data on which he based his (unsupported) conclusions. He was under contract with a consortium of news organizations, and those news organizations refused to allow him to release the data.

Just think about that! What is the purpose of a news organization supposed to be? It’s supposed to be to provide knowledge to the public that helps them to become more informed citizens. In this case, not only did all of our largest national news organizations do nothing to help us unravel the events behind the huge exit poll discrepancies in the 2004 Presidential election, but they actively sought to prevent us from acquiring the information we would need to most accurately analyze those events ourselves. What does that say about our national news organizations?


The effort to challenge the 2004 election in the U.S. Senate

As I was concerned about the large red shift in the 2004 election, as well as a good deal of supporting evidence for election fraud not discussed in this chapter, in early January, 2005, I participated in a four-person delegation to lobby U.S. Senators to officially challenge the official presidential vote count. We believed that the results of the election should not be accepted as is until more investigation was done into allegations of election fraud. At the very least it was important to us that at least one U.S. Senator officially challenge the results. If that was done, it would require by law that the U.S. Senate and House publicly debate the issue for a couple of hours. That was very important to us because we felt that it was crucially important that the American people be aware of the dangers to our election system and our democracy.

Our delegation was able to make appointments with the staff of four Democratic Senators. They all listened to us respectfully, but at the same time it didn’t seem likely to us that their bosses would agree to officially challenge the election results. Only one U.S. Senator made the courageous decision to do so: Barbara Boxer of California. In a public appearance, Senator Boxer publicly acknowledged, “Four years ago I didn't intervene. I was asked by Al Gore not to do so and I didn't do so. Frankly, looking back on it, I wish I had”.

The decision of Al Gore in 2000 to ask Democratic Senators not to challenge the results of the 2000 election was a typical reaction of a politician to fears of being labeled a sore loser, just as John Kerry’s similar request in 2004 was based upon similar motivations. An article by Alan Fram just prior to the U.S. House and Senate challenge of the Ohio election results demonstrates the ambivalence of Democratic congresspersons on this issue:


In large part because of this ambivalence by our Democratic leaders, although the challenge did receive some national attention, it was short-lived and rarely discussed in the public media since.

June 29, 2012

Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen Too?

I'm currently working with a publisher, Biting Duck Press, to publish a book (title as yet undetermined) on the corruption in our election system. We hope that it will help to make Americans more vigilant and concerned about the way our elections are run. I’ve drafted most of the book. I am currently intending to post large portions of it on DU, in the hope of stimulating discussion and obtaining useful feedback. I have previously posted a draft Chapter 1 of the book, concerning the stealing of the 2000 Presidential election in three parts. This post begins Chapter 2.


WAS THE 2004 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION STOLEN TOO?

It was well known in the days prior to the 2004 Presidential election that a Bush victory was highly unlikely without Bush carrying both Ohio and Florida. As Election Day unfolded, spirits in the Kerry camp were running high, as it became evident that Ohio’s 20 electoral votes would determine the victor, and Kerry had a comfortable lead in the Ohio exit poll. Even CNN’s right wing hack, Robert Novak, acknowledged that it would be an uphill climb for Bush.

But as the results came in from Ohio, optimism in the Kerry camp began to fade, and by late evening their remaining hope was narrowed down to strongly Democratic Cuyahoga County, and especially Cleveland, where reports of large pre-election increases in new voter registration and exceptionally high voter turnout had circulated. But this remaining hope soon faded, as it became clear that the (official) voter turnout from Cleveland was in fact miserably low, and by noon the next day John Kerry conceded the election, which he officially lost by about 119 thousand votes.

In this chapter I will not discuss all of the evidence for a stolen 2004 election, as I will reserve most of that for later chapters that deal with election fraud by type of fraud. In this chapter I will discuss: 1) the record breaking discrepancy between the many exit polls that were performed as voters left the polls and the official vote count; 2) the widespread silence regarding that discrepancy by our national news media, and; 3) the corrupted vote recounts that were performed when citizens concerned about the integrity of the election challenged the results.


The Discrepancy Between the Exit Polls and the Official Vote Count (The “Red Shift”)

The exit polling on Election Day 2004 was performed by Mitofsky International and Edison Media Research, under contract to six major news media organizations. Warren Mitofsky, who led the project, had been performing exit polls for 35 years and was recognized as the leading expert on exit polling.

For ease of discussion I will refer to the discrepancy between the exit poll results and the official vote count as a “red shift”, the term that is commonly used to describe it. ‘Red’ refers to the fact that the TV networks colored states red that had voted for George Bush. The term ‘red shift’ refers to the fact that the exit polls predicted a Kerry win nationally and in most states, but when the official results were tallied, the vote count was found to be shifted nationally and in the vast majority of states towards Bush.

An analysis by Jonathan Simon and Ron Baiman examined the red shift. The final exit polls, posted at 12:23 a.m. on Wednesday morning, November 3, predicted Kerry with 50.8% of the national vote and Bush with 48.2% of the national vote – a difference of 2.6%. In marked contrast, the machines that were responsible for the official vote count registered a national vote of 50.9% for Bush and 48.1% for Kerry, a 2.8% Bush victory. The difference between the exit poll results and the official vote count – the red shift – was thus 5.4%. The statistical odds against such a large discrepancy occurring by chance were astronomical, approximating one in a million.

Steven Freeman, in his book, Was the 2004 Election Stolen?, reports an analysis of the red shift in the 11 states recognized as battleground states (or swing states) just prior to Election Day. His results showed red shifts in ten of those states, no blue shifts (shifts towards Kerry from the exit poll to the official vote count), and one state (Wisconsin) where there was no shift at all. These are the results:

State …… Exit poll result ….….… Official vote count ….. Red shift
NH………… Kerry by 10.8% ........ Kerry by 1.3% ....... 9.5%
OH………… Kerry by 4.2% ......... Bush by 2.5% ........ 6.7%
PA………… Kerry by 8.7% .......... Kerry by 2.2% …….. 6.5%
MN………… Kerry by 9.0% ......... Kerry by 3.5% …….. 5.5%
FL……….… Bush by 0.1% .......... Bush by 5.0% …….. 4.9%
NV……..… Kerry by 1.3% .......... Bush by 2.6% …….. 3.9%
NM……..… Kerry by 2.6% ......... Bush by 1.1% ……… 3.7%
CO……..… Bush by 1.8% .......... Bush by 5.2% ……… 3.4%
IA ………… Kerry by 1.3% ………… Bush by 0.9% ………. 2.2%
MI ……….. Kerry by 5.0% ………… Kerry by 3.4% …….. 1.6%
WI ……….. Kerry by 0.4% …….…. Kerry by 0.4% …….. 0.0%

Thus, if the official vote count had approximated the exit poll findings, Kerry would have won not only the national popular vote, but four additional states, including Ohio, Nevada, Iowa, and New Mexico (and maybe Florida). Ohio was the only one of those states (other than Florida) whose electoral votes would have swung the election to Kerry. Thus the vast majority of focus by those concerned about a stolen election was on Ohio.


Reasons for discrepancies between exit polls and official vote counts

When exit polls differ substantially from official election results, there can be only three reasons (or combination thereof):

1. Random error, or chance
2. Biased exit polls
3. Impaired election integrity

Let’s consider these possibilities one at a time:

1. The role of random error (or chance)
The first step in the assessment of any statistical discrepancy is to assess the role of chance in producing the discrepancy. This can be accomplished easily with statistical tests. As noted above, the likelihood of the discrepancy between the national exit polls and the official national results occurring by chance was calculated statistically by Jonathan Simon and Ron Baiman as being close to one in a million. US Count Votes (USCV) estimated that the likelihood of the discrepancy between the combined state exit polls and the official state results occurring by chance was about one in ten million.

2. The potential role of exit poll bias
It is unfortunate that the knee jerk response of the national news media was to assume that the only legitimate explanation for the red shift was that there was something wrong with the exit polls, rather than consider that there may have been a problem with the election itself. Mitofsky himself conducted a quick analysis and produced a report that supported the news media assumptions. Paramount among the conclusions of the report were two statements: “Exit polls do not support the allegations of fraud due to rigging of voting equipment” AND “Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters”. The first of these statements implies that a problem with the election was not the reason for the red shift. The second statement implies that exit poll bias was the reason for the red shift. Unfortunately, both of these statements were stated as conclusions rather than as hypotheses, even though there was almost nothing in the report to back them up. I will discuss both of these hypotheses separately in a moment, but first let’s consider two basic types of exit poll bias.

Exit poll bias can be broken down into two components: Biased sampling of precincts AND bias within precincts – referred to as “within precinct error” (WPE). The former can be easily tested, and the latter cannot be easily tested (and many question whether or not it can be accurately tested at all). Mitofsky tested bias due to sampling of precincts and concluded that this bias actually favored Bush. Therefore, the hypothesis that the exit poll bias (in favor of Kerry) might explain the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official election results becomes less likely, since all of this bias must be concentrated within precincts (WPE), and this bias must account for not only the discrepancy between the poll results and the official election results, but also it must cancel out the bias in the opposite direction due to sampling of precincts, which works in Bush’s favor.

So with that in mind, let’s consider the Mitofsky statement that “Exit polls do not support the allegations of fraud due to rigging of voting equipment”. What was this statement based on? The report states:

This is the sum of the report’s evidence for the absence of election fraud.

But both touch screen and optical scan machines count the votes by computer. And so do all other methods of vote tabulation except for the hand counting of paper ballots. Deep in the report, but not in the executive summary, is the average WPE data by type of voting equipment:

Type of voting …....WPE – i.e. within precinct “error”
Paper ballot: ………. -2.2
Mechanical: ………. -10.6
Touch screen: ………-7.1
Punch cards: ………. -6.6
Optical scan: ………..-6.1

Note that the magnitude of the negative WPE (i.e. within precinct error, with the negative sign meaning that the official vote favored Bush compared to the exit poll results) is considerably less in precincts where paper ballots were used, compared to any other method. How does the finding of a much smaller WPE (i.e. less negative) for precincts with paper ballots than for precincts using machines to count the vote support the conclusion that “Exit polls do not support the allegations of fraud due to rigging of voting equipment”?

Next let’s consider the statement in Mitofsky’s report that “Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters”. This is commonly known as the “reluctant Bush voter hypothesis”. If the reluctant Bush voter hypothesis was valid, where would you expect the lowest voter response rates to be? One would think that the lowest voter response rates would be most likely to occur in precincts that leaned heavily to Bush – since the hypothesis postulates that the reason for the biased polls (producing the red shift) is reluctance of Bush voters to participate in these polls. However, when USCV analyzed the data presented in the Mitofsky report, they found exactly the opposite: Precincts with the highest percentage of Bush voters had the highest, not the lowest response rate. This must certainly strongly count against the reluctant Bush voter hypothesis. Yet that hypothesis was put forward in the Mitofsky report and thus in the national news media as the primary explanation for the difference between the exit poll results and the official vote count (i.e. the red shift).

But don’t yet give up hope on the reluctant Bush voter hypothesis. It can be (and was) revised to say that, although Bush voters in general were more reluctant to participate in the polls than Kerry voters, this did not apply to precincts where there were a very high percentage of Bush voters, because in those precincts the Bush voters would perhaps feel more comfortable participating in a poll.

This revised hypothesis can also be tested. If the hypothesis applied only to precincts without a heavy preponderance of Bush voters, then one would expect that those precincts would be where the highest WPE would be found. But in fact, by Mitofsky’s own data, precisely the opposite is the case: The average WPE is highest, not lowest, in precincts where there were a very high percent of Bush voters (80% or more). This too must count as further strong evidence against the reluctant Bush voter hypothesis.

So where did Mitofsky come up with the idea of the reluctant Bush voter? This is it:


So how do all these factors that contributed to a high discrepancy between the exit polls and the official results (i.e. red shift) support the contention that Bush voters were less likely to participate in the exit polls than Kerry voters? Mitofsky doesn’t explain this in his report. As I noted above, the only analyses that looked directly at the reluctant Bush voter hypothesis provided strong evidence against it. Nor does the Mitofsky report contain any quantitative assessment of the extent to which he believes that the above factors caused exit poll bias.

3. The potential role of election fraud
What about the role of election fraud. Mitofsky barely discusses that possibility except to say that their data doesn’t support that possibility, and to offer as evidence for that statement the fact that he found “no systematic differences for precincts using touch screen and optical scan voting equipment”. The fact that there was a great difference between precincts using paper ballots and those using machines to count their vote is not mentioned in their report at all, except that it appears in the table that I reproduced above.

Direct evidence of various kinds of election fraud will be discussed in subsequent chapters. In this chapter I will simply mention a couple lines of evidence that were immediately apparent from looking at available data.

If the 2004 Presidential election was fraudulent, one would expect more fraud to have occurred in those states where there was a reasonable chance of switching their electoral votes from Kerry to Bush (i.e., the swing – or battleground – states). Of the 11 main swing states (OH, FL, PA, WI, MN, NM, IA, NV, NH, MI, CO), according to Mitofsky, in five of them there was a discrepancy between the exit polls and the official election results that were outside of the margin of error (I’m defining outside of the margin of error as less than a 5% probability of occurring by chance). These five swing states included Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and New Hampshire. Of the remaining 39 states, only 8 were outside of the margin of error (In all 13 states that were outside of the margin of error, the exit polls favored Kerry, compared to the official election results). I believe that this finding supports the suggestion of election fraud.

Secondly, Mitofsky acknowledges in his executive summary that the “exit poll error” was higher in 2004 than in previous years for which he has data (going back to 1988). It seems to me that concurrence in time of the record-breaking discrepancy between the exit polls and the official vote (red shift) with a greater ability than ever to use secret software codes to fix elections is not a coincidence. Rather, that concurrence suggests election fraud as a primary explanation for the discrepancy.

4. Summary of immediately apparent reasons for the great red shift of 2004
In summary, based on information and data that was readily available following the 2004 election, the following can be said about the reasons for the red shift (exit polls that suggested that Kerry won the presidency, in the face of an official victory for Bush).

Random error (chance) is easily ruled out through routine statistical tests as an explanation for the red shift.

Exit poll bias cannot be completely ruled out. However, the following can be said against the likelihood that exit poll bias accounts for the discrepancies between the official election results and the exit polls:

An analysis of potential bias from the choosing of precincts to participate in the exit polls shows no red shift at all. In fact, it shows a slight blue shift.

Although the Mitofsky report proposes that Bush voters were less likely than Kerry voters to participate in the exit polling, it provides no direct evidence for that. Other groups, which have tested that hypothesis directly, have found that the data provides evidence against that hypothesis rather than in favor of it.

The following can be said in favor of election fraud as an explanation for the red shift.

According to Mitofsky’s own report, the red shift was outside of the margin of error in 5 of the 11 crucial swing states (OH, FL, PA, NH, MN) and in only 8 of the other 39 states. That is consistent with the likelihood that if election fraud were committed in the 2004 presidential election it would be most likely to be committed in states where it really mattered – the swing states.

The concurrence of by far the largest exit poll discrepancy (2004) demonstrated in any year since Edison-Mitofsky began conducting exit polls with the greatest use of machine voting suggests that voting machines played a role in producing the red shift (i.e. that the official election results did not fully measure the intent of the voters.)

The fact that precincts that used paper ballots (rather than methods in which the votes were counted by machines) demonstrated by far the smallest red shifts lends further support to the idea that voting machines played a role in producing the red shift.

There is much more evidence than this, but much of that will be covered in later chapters.


The next post in this series will consider the widespread silence of our corporate owned news media on this issue, and asks why, since the United States government officially condones the use of exit polls to identify election fraud in other countries, was there such deafening silence in this country when the winner of the official vote was predicted by the exit polls to be the loser.

June 26, 2012

How the Miami Herald Helped Legitimize the Florida 2000 Selection of George W. Bush as President

I'm currently working with a publisher, Biting Duck Press, to publish a book (title as yet undetermined) on the corruption in our election system. We intend to have it published prior to the November election, and hope that it will help to make Americans more vigilant and concerned about the way our elections are run. I’ve drafted most of the book. I am currently intending to post large portions of it on DU, in the hope of stimulating discussion and obtaining useful feedback.

My first post on this topic dealt with Election Day 2000, and included explanations for the national networks’ two wrong calls that day and the automatic machine recount – all of which helped to explain how screwed up this election was. My second post dealt with the 36 day Florida recount, ending with the SCOTUS decision to stop the counting and award the presidency to Bush. In this post, the third and last portion of Chapter 1 of my developing book, I discuss how the Miami Herald helped to legitimize Bush’s “victory” by conducting their own recount of Florida’s undervotes in a manner that was highly biased towards making Bush appear to be the legitimate winner of the election. Included in this discussion is the illegal voter purge conducted by Florida’s Jeb Bush administration, which was probably more decisive in George W. Bush’s victory than any other single factor.


Spinning the 2000 election to make it look like Bush would have won anyhow

In a purported effort to find out who would have won the election had the Supreme Court not stopped the vote counting, the Miami Herald undertook an investigation. Following their re-count of the Florida 2000 Presidential undervotes in 2001, they made public statements about their findings which, though very misleading, tended to legitimize that election to the American public. Those statements were then parroted by the corporate owned news media, with the result that many or most Americans believe even today that Bush’s ascendance to the Presidency in 2000 was legitimate. Therefore, it is important to understand why the public statements made by the Miami Herald about the re-count of the 2000 Florida election were misleading.

Here is the most important of the statements I refer to, made by the Miami Herald in their 2001 book, “The Miami Herald Report – Democracy Held Hostage – The Complete Investigation of the 2000 Presidential Election Including Results of the Independent Recount”, found on page 167:

The Herald’s conclusion was based on their counting of the undervotes in Florida, as had been mandated by the Florida Supreme Court before the vote counting was stopped by the U.S. Supreme Court. In other words, the Herald looked at all ballots that did not register a vote for President, in order to see if they could ascertain the intention of the voters. In the case of counties that used optical scan machines, that meant looking for ballots that had marks on them (but had not been read by the machines) indicating a choice for President. In the case of punch card counties that meant ballots (not read by the machines) where there appeared to be an attempt to punch through an area of the ballot that indicated a choice for President. This included ballots with clear punches, hanging chads, small holes known as “pinpricks”, and indentations in the ballot (sometimes called “pregnant chads”).

Bush had been certified the winner of the Florida election by Secretary of State Katherine Harris, by 537 votes. That total represented a Bush lead in machine counted votes of 1,202 minus a 665 Gore lead among the undervotes recounted in Broward and Volusia Counties, which were the only two counties whose recounted undervotes were accepted into the official vote count by Secretary Harris. So, in order to come to the conclusion that Gore won the election, he would have to have enough of an advantage among the undervotes to overcome that 1,202 vote Bush lead among the votes that had been registered excluding the counting of any undervotes. The Herald goes on to add up the numbers, based on their analysis and counting, and they come up with a total which shows a Bush “victory” by 1,665 votes. That’s their final and most publicized conclusion. That conclusion rests on their specifying a total net undervote count in the state of 463 in favor of Bush (which added to the pre-undervote count of 1,202 gives 1,665).

But wait. Look at the Appendix at the back of the book, and add up the totals. Gore has 995 more undervotes than Bush in the punch card counties and 319 more votes than Bush in the optical scan counties. That’s a total of 1,314 more votes than Bush among the undervotes. That overcomes the 1,202 lead that Bush had prior to the counting of any undervotes: Counting of all the undervotes results in a win for Gore of 1,314 votes minus 1,202 votes = 112 votes.
How did that happen? How do you get a Bush victory of 1,665 when the Herald does its calculations in the text of the book, and yet the numbers in their own Appendix clearly show a Gore victory of 112 votes? That’s a discrepancy of 1,777 votes. To understand how this happened, go back to page 171, and you see that the Herald did not include in their calculations (though they ARE included in their Appendix) seven counties (Palm Beach, Broward, Volusia, Hamilton, Manatee, Escambia, and Madison) plus part of another county (Miami-Dade)*. Still, there would have been no discrepancy had the Herald’s count of the votes in those counties (as depicted in their Appendix) matched the counts that they actually used for these counties in their calculations. But they didn’t match at all. Most important, the Herald counted 907 more net votes in Palm Beach County for Gore, and they counted 908 more net votes in Broward County for Gore than what they used in their calculations that gave Bush the “victory”. That accounts for a 1,815 vote discrepancy in favor of Bush, of the 1,777 vote discrepancy in favor of Bush between the Herald’s calculations and their Appendix that I noted above. The remainder of the discrepancy came from Volusia, Miami-Dade, Escambia, Hamilton, Madison, and Manatee Counties. Those discrepancies were all much smaller than the discrepancies in Broward and Palm Beach Counties, which voted heavily Democratic. But the important thing to note is that Gore has a 112 votes lead when all of the undervotes are counted by the Herald.

So why was there almost a two thousand vote discrepancy between the Miami Herald’s re-count of the undervotes and those undervotes that had already been counted (most of the discrepancy being from Palm Beach and Broward Counties)? For one thing, Palm Beach County, under the leadership of Theresa LePore (the creator of the “butterfly ballot”), had used a ridiculously stringent standard for their re-count. Broward County is more difficult to explain, but it should be remembered that they were in a great hurry to re-count the votes, and they were under tremendous pressure from the Bush machine in Florida and from the corporate media.

In other words, one can demonstrate a Bush “victory” in Florida only if one uses a very stringent standard for counting the undervotes in the two most heavily Democratic counties in the state (Broward and Palm Beach) but uses the more reasonable standard mandated by the Florida Supreme Court (which was to ascertain the intention of the voter) to count the undervotes in most of the rest of the state. That’s how the Miami Herald came up with a Bush “victory”. Their own re-count of the state-wide undervote clearly showed a Gore victory. But they didn’t emphasize that. However, they do discuss it on pages 168-9 – as if it isn’t of primary importance:


I will now try to put this whole confusing mess in simple language, since it is so important. The Miami Herald conducted an analysis of the undervotes in all Florida counties in order to ascertain who really won the election. But they did not use all the vote totals that they came up with in their analysis. Instead, most importantly in heavily Democratic Palm Beach and Broward Counties, they used pre-existing vote counts produced by county election officials. Those vote counts were much less favorable to Gore than what the Miami Herald obtained using standards identical to what they used for the rest of the state. In other words, the constant Republican pressure exerted during the recounts in Palm Beach and Broward Counties apparently paid off. That pressure was exerted in the form of demands to “compromise” on the standard for counting the votes. Whereas the Florida Supreme Court decision of December 8 required that votes be allocated on the basis of voter intent, during the county hand recounts, Republicans successfully pressured those responsible for the recounts to adopt a much stricter standard.

* The Herald did not use the results of their count from Broward or Volusia Counties because those counties had already performed a full recount, which had been officially certified. They did not use their results from Palm Beach and part of Miami-Dade Counties because the Florida Supreme Court had instructed that votes from those counties from previous re-counting were to be added to the total without re-counting them again – and the Herald used those counts in their final calculations. And, the Herald did not use their results from Escambia, Madison, Manatee, and Hamilton Counties because those counties had reported completion of their counting before the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the state wide recount – and the Herald accepted those reported counts for their calculations.


Voter purging in preparation for the 2000 Presidential election in Florida

An illegal voter purge appears to be the most important factor in Bush’s victory. If not for that purge, Gore’s margin of victory would have been great enough that no recounts would have been required, so the U.S. Supreme Court would not have been enabled to steal the election. Yet the Miami Herald barely mentions this in their report and attach almost not importance to it. They state:


Note that they don’t say that they did any investigation of this matter. They simply state that there is “no widespread evidence” of it.

As initially reported by Greg Palast, in preparation for the 2000 election the state of Florida conducted a massive voter purge of presumed ex-felons, who were not allowed to vote by Florida law. This resulted in the purging of approximately 58,000 Florida voters. The problem was that a very loose computer match to a known felon was required to perform the purge. Consequently, an investigation by Salon.com found that approximately 15% of the purged voters were purged incorrectly. This was by design, as the state of Florida requested very loose matching criteria. Partly because race was often used as a match criterion, according to one analysis 88% of purged voters were black, even though blacks accounted for only 11% of Florida voters. Given the 15% error rate for the computer matches, as well as information that 2,883 of the purged voters were found to be from states that restore voting rights when their sentence is served – therefore, Florida had no legal right to purge them – it was estimated that almost 12,000 voters were purged incorrectly. Given that a very high percentage of them were black and that blacks voted for Gore by an overwhelming margin (more than 90%), it is obvious that the illegal voter purge alone cost Gore several thousand net votes. This is a very conservative analysis of how many votes Al Gore lost from illegal voter purging in this election. Later analysis, based on admissions by the database company that conducted the purging, revealed the net loss to Gore to be tens of thousands of votes (See Chapter 6).


Conclusions on the 2000 Presidential election

So who really won the 2000 election? Al Gore won the national popular vote by about half a million votes, but he lost in the Electoral College when he lost Florida by an official margin of 537 votes. The U.S. Supreme Court awarded the election to Bush in a 5-4 decision that stopped the recount, in one of the most blatantly political and legally unsupported decisions in U.S. Supreme Court history. The Miami Herald investigation determined that even if the recount had been allowed to continue Bush still would have “won” the election. But that statement accurately applies only in a very narrow sense. It disregards all of the following:

The undervote
The stated purpose of the Herald investigation was to analyze and count only the previously uncounted undervotes. That analysis showed a Bush victory. However, although the Herald investigation analyzed and counted the two most Democratic counties in Florida (Palm Beach and Broward) they did not use those counts to form their final conclusions regarding the Bush “victory”. Instead they used the count produced by county election officials, which the Herald acknowledged produced a vote count that favored Bush by almost two thousand votes compared to the Herald’s own analysis. Nobody knows the precise reason for that huge discrepancy. It can only be assumed that intense Republican pressure during the recount intimidated election officials from counting many valid votes.

The over-vote
The Herald’s investigation did not count the over-votes at all in arriving at their vote totals , despite the fact that a good amount of evidence suggests that Gore probably lost thousands of net votes to ballots with double votes on them. One reason for not analyzing over-votes is that in individual cases it can be almost impossible to determine the intent of the voter. However, at least one category of over-votes could easily have been examined to determine the intent of the voter – those with the candidate’s name written on the ballot. Had that been done, Gore would have netted an additional 873 votes – far more than enough to overcome his official deficit of 537 votes.

Voter purging
The illegal purging of predominantly black voters from the voter rolls resulted in a net loss of several thousand votes for Gore. This was not considered at all in the Herald’s calculations.

Electronic vote switching
Then there is the possibility of electronic vote switching. We know that Volusia County alone deleted more than 16 thousand votes from Gore through an electronic “glitch”. That deletion resulted in the premature calling of the election for Bush, until the glitch was caught and reversed. Nobody (except those most intimately involved) knows if that glitch was an accident or whether it was the result of an attempt to steal the election. Nor does anyone know if other smaller “glitches” occurred in Florida on Election Day, which were not caught and reversed.

Other issues
This chapter deals only with some of the most important and obvious means by which the will of Florida voters was subverted on Election Day 2000. There were several others, not discussed her, such as 680 illegal overseas ballots that the Bush team managed to get into the official vote count.

I will discuss just one other means by which Gore undoubtedly lost numerous net votes – unobservable undervotes. We all know that poor, black, and Democratic areas used much older punch card voting machines than wealthier and Republican areas. This was true not only in Florida in 2000, but in most past elections in counties throughout the country. The failure to completely punch holes in ballots resulted in a disproportionately large number of undervotes for Gore. Many of these votes were reclaimed during the recount process. However, in cases where hole punching was a complete failure, there would have been no opportunity to assess the will of the voter from looking at the ballot. That means that the wealthy have a big advantage over the poor with regard to their opportunity to vote. This will remain true until something is done about it.

June 24, 2012

The Stealing of the 2000 Presidential Election: Ch 1, Part 2 – The 36-Day Battle to Recount the Vote

I'm currently working with a publisher, Biting Duck Press, to publish a book (title as yet undetermined) on the corruption in our election system. We intend to have it published prior to the November election, and hope that it will help to make Americans more vigilant and concerned about the way our elections are run. I’ve drafted most of the book. I am currently intending to post large portions of it on DU, in the hope of stimulating discussion and obtaining useful feedback.

My first post on this topic dealt with Election Day 2000, and included explanations for the national networks’ two wrong calls that day and the automatic machine recount – all of which helped to explain how screwed up this election was. In this post I’ll discuss the highly controversial 36-day Florida recount, which ended when the U.S. Supreme Court abruptly ended the vote count and awarded Florida and thereby the national election to George W. Bush in what many consider to be one of the three worst U.S. Supreme Court decisions in U.S. history.


Controversies over the hand recounts and vote counting standards

The effort to initiate and conduct a hand recount was a long and arduous affair, with a great amount of legal wrangling, arguments, and posturing before the press, finally ending on December 13th, 36 days after Election Day, when the U.S. Supreme Court abruptly stopped the vote counting and essentially declared Bush the winner.

In the initial days following Election Day, the Bush team went to great effort to stop the recount from occurring, despite the fact that it was specifically allowed by Florida statute. Publicly, they tried to cast Gore as a "sore loser" for trying to obtain the recount. They even began to develop and use (in protest marches) big signs which read "Sore Loserman", as a pun on Gore/Lieberman.

Bush team arguments to stop the recount
Their most common arguments were several versions of the allegation that the Gore campaign was trying to obtain "recount after recount after recount, no matter how many times Bush won the election". This was the favorite refrain of James Baker, Bush's campaign chief in the post-election. Of course the phrase "recount after recount after recount" was meant to convey the impression that Gore was trying to obtain an infinite number of recounts, until he won the election. This impression was apparently facilitated by the fact that the networks had originally called the election for Bush.

But the fact of the matter is that only one recount was even close to being completed, and that was the recount that took place automatically, immediately after the initial election returns put Bush ahead with a margin of less than a tenth of a percent of the total vote, without the Gore team having to request it. The hand recount that Gore requested, on the other hand, was completed in only three counties prior to the Florida Supreme Court decision (see below) ordering every county in the state to perform a hand recount, with the exception of Broward, Volusia, and Palm Beach counties (which had already completed their hand recount), and part of Dade County.
In the same vein, the Bush team frequently noted that Bush won the election after each recount. Apparently what they meant by this was that every time a county stopped counting and a new vote total was announced, with Bush still ahead, that was considered to be another winning of the election. As time went on, this line of attack became less and less frequent, as it became obvious that not enough people were buying it.

Another line, which I associate with Mary Matelin, was that "These votes weren't meant to be counted by hand, they were meant to be counted by machine because machines are much more accurate," (why didn't someone ask her how she knew this?) After a parade of voting experts made the point that nothing could be further from the truth, this line of attack also slowed to a crawl.

The fact is, as the experts explained it, that an unknown number of ballots that were not counted in the second machine count (i.e., the automatic recount) may still have had hanging chads or have been partially punched through, indicating the intent of the voter to vote for a given candidate. In order to get a better look at what the voter intended, the best way to do this is to look at the ballots with the human eye. This was in fact what Florida law allowed for, as did the law of many other states. Yet the Bush team tried repeatedly to give the impression that the request for the recount was some sort of radical request.

When it was pointed out that Bush himself, as Governor of Texas, had signed into law in Texas a similar statute, which in fact clearly stated that hand recounts are preferable to machine counts because they are more accurate, this contention was made less often. But it didn't stop completely, because the Bush team was still able to think of all sorts of implausible explanations as to why the Texas law was different from Florida’s.

Then there was the contention that repeated handling of the ballots changed their nature, therefore magically producing additional votes for Gore. To "prove" this point, the Republican "observers" in counties where the votes were being counted actually photographed chads that had fallen onto the floor during the vote counting process. Apparently they believed that since they had photographic evidence of this, a certain number of unknowledgeable people would believe that this was important information. But it seems to me that a reasonably inquisitive person should have been able to question what the ballots looked like before the chads fell onto the floor. Did the chads that fell to the floor originate spontaneously from being handled by the vote counters, or were they created by the voters when they voted?

When Bush team people were finally challenged to explain how it was that these chads that ended up on the floor originated in the first place, they claimed that it happened from mere handling of the ballots. Chris Matthews of MSNBC wouldn't totally buy this, and I heard him at least once say to a Bush team person that he didn't see how that could happen (and noted that he couldn't do it himself). He even asked the guy to show him how it was done. When the man made a lame excuse for not being able to do this, rather than embarrass him further, Matthews quickly dropped the matter – thus missing a great opportunity to shed light on the fraud being perpetrated upon the American people.

Another excuse was that the recount would take too long, so that it would not be finished by Inauguration Day, or by the time that the Electoral College was supposed to vote. There might have been some believability to this originally. However, the individual canvassing boards made it clear that it would not take anywhere near as long as the Republicans would have us believe, and later events were to prove this beyond any doubt.

Another Bush team argument was that a hand recount could allow for cheating, whereas machines don't cheat. That could be theoretically possible, I suppose, but the fact that "observers" from both sides were on the scene at all times made that argument considerably less powerful. And machines do cheat when they’re programmed to do so.

Another theoretically plausible argument for not doing the hand count was that there was a big question as to what standard to use for counting the ballots. The Florida statute merely said that "the clear intent of the voter" should be ascertained. Nobody quite knew precisely how that should be done, and many of the canvassing boards sought legal input into this question and had a great deal of trouble in deciding upon the appropriate standard. The Bush team point of view on this was that since there was no well defined standard it would be unfair to count these votes at all, because that would "dilute" other votes cast in Florida. I will come back to this all important point later.

The great majority of arguments that the Bush team made for public consumption were not made in their court challenges because they knew that no court would buy them. In court they argued:

1. The count was unfair because only selected Democratic counties were chosen by the Gore team.

2. The law specified that the count should take place only when there was a demonstrated problem with the machine count.

3. The count was unfair because the standards for counting votes varied between one county and another, and there were no uniformly agreed upon standards. As such, it violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution by applying different standards to different voters.

Gore team arguments to continue the recount and extend the deadlines
The main Gore argument was that Florida law required that counties be given the opportunity to hand count votes in a close election. Given that, the part of the law that specified a deadline for certifying the returns did not make sense because it did not leave enough time to count the votes. The Bush team had no real counter argument to that (in my opinion), other than to reiterate that the law specified a deadline.

In court the Gore team rebutted the above noted Bush arguments with the following:

1. In response to the fact that the Gore team had requested only that selected counties be counted, the Court asked the Gore team if they would have any objections to Republican Counties being counted as well. Gore’s answer was that there would be no objections to that. The Court then asked the Bush team if they would like to do that, and the answer was no, they would not.

2. With regard to the issue of a demonstrated problem with the machines, the Gore team noted that there were in fact problems with the punch card machines, as it was demonstrated statistically that counties that used them had five times the undervote rate as counties that used other voting methods. Furthermore, the very fact that the first machine recount resulted in many additional Gore votes, and that the hand counting so far in every disputed county resulted in many additional Gore votes was further indication to this effect.

3. With regard to standards, the Florida statute said plainly that the ballots shall be evaluated to determine the clear intent of the voter. True, that statement could and was in fact interpreted in different ways. But that is what the statute said, and it was up to the individual counties to decide how to interpret it. With regard to the issue of equal protection, how could that even be an issue? It was obvious that different voting methods were used in different counties. So how could different ways of evaluating the votes make protection less equal? In any event, it seemed clear that hand counting the undercounted ballots made the protection more equal than it would be without any counting at all.


The Brooks Brothers riot

The Brooks Brothers riot occurred in the midst of all the legal and public controversy over the recount. Made to appear as if it were a spontaneous protest against the recount, which the Bush team vociferously argued against at so many levels, it was later found to be organized by the Republican Party. In fact, many of the participants later went on to jobs in the Bush administration or other high level Republican positions. The riot/protest is commonly referred to as the Brooks-Brothers riot because the expensive clothes that many of the rioters wore were not exactly what you’d expect of protesters.

The purpose of the riot was to intimidate Miami-Dade County election officials and thereby prevent them from concluding their recount in time to get the results officially certified. That goal appears to have been successful, as the Miami-Dade County recount officially ceased on November 22.

In the long run it does not appear that the episode had any effect on the final results, as the Florida Supreme Court later ordered the partial results of the Miami-Dade County recount to be added to the official vote count and that the counting be resumed as part of a state-wide total hand recount effort. The counting then was stopped a couple days later by order of the U.S. Supreme Court. Nonetheless, this episode is worth recounting as an example of the violent extent to which some will go to win an election.

According to Democratic County Chairman Joe Geller:

The New York Times reported:



Florida Supreme Court Decision – December 8

Following a series of bitter legal challenges, hand recounts initiated in four Democratic counties selected by Gore, failure to meet recount mandated deadlines, stops and starts in the various county recounts, and the waxing and waning of Bush’s lead as recount results came in, Florida Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris certified Bush as the winner of the Florida election on November 26. On December 4, the Leon County Circuit Court ruled against Gore’s contest of the election results, thus upholding Secretary Harris’s certification of Bush as the winner. Gore immediately appealed that ruling to the Florida Supreme Court.

On December 8, the Florida Supreme Court ruled in favor of Gore by a 4-3 margin, totally repudiating the Leon County Circuit Court’s ruling. They ordered not just a review of the ballots that the Gore team requested, but a recount of all of the undervotes in Florida that had not been previously recounted by hand. The majority ruled:


The Court also ruled that the results of the Palm Beach County hand recount and the partial Miami-Dade recount, both which had been rejected by Secretary Harris for being late, be added to the official record – thus dwindling the Bush lead to a little over 100 votes. As the statewide recount began, it appeared that Gore would win.


None Dare Call it Treason – The awarding of the Presidency to George W. Bush by the U.S. Supreme Court

On December 12, four days after the Florida Supreme Court had ordered the hand recounting of the 2000 Presidential election by all of Florida, the U.S. Supreme Court, in their Bush v. Gore decision, by a vote of 5-4 ordered the vote counting to cease, thereby awarding the U.S. Presidency to George W. Bush. Many constitutional scholars consider Bush v. Gore to be one of the three worst U.S. Supreme Court decisions in U.S. history.

In his article, “None Dare Call it Treason”, Vincent Bugliosi (best known for his successful prosecution of Charles Manson before he wrote his expose on the Bush v. Gore decision) goes a little further, as the title of his article implies. His bottom line point is that the Court, in rendering their decision, acted as a surrogate of the Republican Party, rather than as arbiters of the law, as they are required to do. I believe his reasoning is quite sound.

His first point is that only grounds on which the Supreme Court was justified in even hearing the case would be to prevent the petitioner (Bush) from being harmed. Yet the only harm that could accrue to Bush from a full counting of the votes would be that he would lose an election – if Gore received more votes than him.

The first argument that the Supreme Court used to justify their decision to stop the vote counting was based on the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. They argued that since different interpretive standards were used in different counties to count the undervotes, equal protection was not provided to voters from different counties. So their solution was to not allow any of the hand counted undervotes to count. That decision was absolutely bizarre on several levels. First, every state, and most counties within every state use different methods of voting, which impinge on election results. By the reasoning of the Court, the whole Presidential election would have had to have been invalidated on that basis. Furthermore, how are the voters protected by having their votes not count at all? Yet the Court argued that their decision was meant to preserve the “fundamental right” to vote. And their decision was tragically ironic because the 14th Amendment was initially passed to protect minorities, and yet it was largely minority voters who were disenfranchised by their decision. Bugliosi notes that the real violation of the Equal Protection Clause was the Supreme Court’s decision to stop the vote counting. Thus Bugliosi concludes (correctly in my opinion) that:


Bugliosi marshaled several other lines of evidence, which I won’t go into, to prove that there was no legal foundation on which the decision was rendered. He provides his final argument by first noting that decisions by high courts are supposed to stand for legal principles, yet the Court’s majority gives plenty of evidence that they knew that their decision did not stand for any legal principle. Based on their decision, all future national elections could easily be invalidated on the same grounds that the Court invalidated this one, since every state and most counties within states use different equipment and voting machines in their elections. So, to get around that problem, the Court majority wrote that their ruling was “Limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities”. Bugliosi comments on this:


Another way of putting this is that the majority justices said that their decision should definitely not be used as a precedent for any future cases – an unprecedented statement in the annals of U.S. Supreme Court history. Bugliosi concludes with the consequences of the decision:


John Paul Stevens, one of the four dissenting judges in the case, was slightly more cautious than Bugliosi in his criticism of the decision. Stevens was a life long Republican, appointed by Richard Nixon to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1970 and nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by Gerald Ford in 1975. Sevens’ 7-page dissent may be unprecedented as a scathing indictment of his fellow justices in the annals of U.S. Supreme Court history. At the end of his opinion, Stevens writes, after noting that the majority decision represented an assault on Florida election law caused by an utter lack of confidence in the Florida judges who ordered the recount:



My next post will complete my coverage of the 2000 Presidential election in Florida. In that post I’ll discuss: 1) the Florida voter purge prior to the election; 2) how the Miami Herald spun the results of its own recount to make it appear that Bush won the election anyhow, and: 3) a summary of the many ways in which Al Gore was cheated out of the presidency in Florida.

June 23, 2012

The Stealing of the 2000 Presidential Election

I'm currently working with a publisher, Biting Duck Press, to publish a book (title as yet undetermined) on the corruption in our election system. We intend to have it published prior to the November election, and hope that it will help to make Americans more vigilant and concerned about the way our elections are run. I’ve drafted most of the book. I am currently intending to post large portions of it on DU, in the hope of stimulating discussion and obtaining useful feedback. I’ll start with a portion of the first chapter:


THE STEALING OF THE 2000 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

Going into Election Day 2000, the Presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush was judged to be very close. Three battleground states with early closing times – Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan – were polling very close and held the key to victory. Pundits had been saying that if either candidate won all three of them, that would be the ball game.


Election Day 2000

Florida initially looked very promising for Gore. Turnout appeared to be very high, especially in African-American and other Democratic areas. Florida was called for Gore early in the evening, beginning at 7:52 p.m., less than an hour after their polls closed. Then the Pennsylvania polls closed, and the election there was said to be too close to call. Shortly after that, the Michigan polls closed and Michigan was immediately called for Gore. An hour or so later, Pennsylvania was called for Gore. With the polls yet to close in the western states, the election appeared to be virtually over, with a victory for Gore.

But then, in a very rare reversal of a network call, starting at 10:13 p.m., the networks took Florida out of the Gore column and called it “too close to call”. Not long after that, it became evident that the winner of Florida would win the election. Then, at 2:16 a.m. Wednesday morning, the networks began calling Florida for Bush. At 2:30 a.m. Gore phoned Bush to concede Florida and the national election. It was at that point that I went to bed.

At about 3:30 a.m. my wife woke me up to tell me that Florida – and with that the whole election – had been put back in the undecided column. I didn’t believe her. The professionals surely wouldn’t reverse their call on the same state twice in the same election! I went back to sleep.

I woke up later that morning to go to work, looked at the TV, and noticed that Florida was now colored white instead of red on the electoral map. What the hell was going on? I listened to the news reports and discovered that Bush was still ahead in the election by 1,784 votes – about three hundredths of a percent lead. Because of the narrowness of the Bush lead, an automatic recount was proceeding, as required by Florida law. That recount, conducted by the same machines that produced the original vote count with Bush up by about 1,784 votes, ended on Friday, November 10, with Bush leading by about 327 votes according to the Associated Press, with all counties having reported their results. By that time, Gore had already requested a full hand recount of four Democratic counties.


Why couldn’t the TV networks get it right?

The TV networks explained their two bad calls (calling Florida for Gore, reversing that, calling it for Bush, and then reversing that too) with the simple phrase, “bad data”. In other words, they hardly explained it at all. But a consideration of those two bad calls – for Gore, and then for Bush – is very important in providing an understanding of what went wrong in this election. Similarly, it is also very important to understand why the automatic machine recount reduced the Bush margin of victory by about 80%.

First bad call – The butterfly ballot and exit polls deviating from the official vote count
First, let’s consider the first bad call – for Gore. Why was Florida called for Gore so early? The fact is that early election predictions and calls are based on a combination of exit polls and official vote counts. Exit polls measure who the voters think they voted for. Normally voters know who they voted for. But in Palm Beach County, Florida, in 2000, a “butterfly ballot” was used for voting for President. The butterfly ballot was very confusing, as Al Gore’s name was listed next to two third party candidates – Patrick Buchanan and Socialist candidate David McReynolds – on the adjacent page, making it difficult to tell which hole punches corresponded to which candidate. This undoubtedly caused many voters who intended to vote for Gore to vote for either Buchanan or McReynolds or one of those candidates plus Gore – in which case the ballot would be rejected as an “over-vote”. As noted in “The Miami Herald Report: Democracy Held Hostage”, page 15:

Even the far right wing fringe candidate Patrick Buchanan acknowledged as much, noting that of the 3,407 votes he received in Palm Beach County, only about ten percent of them were meant for him. “The rest, I’m quite sure, were Gore votes”, he said.

Another line of evidence that supports the idea that Gore lost large numbers of votes due to ballot confusion is the fact that thousands of ballots were rejected as over-votes because they contained votes for more than one candidate. This could have happened when a voter felt that s/he had mistakenly voted for one candidate, so attempted to correct the error by voting for the originally intended candidate. With the Palm Beach County butterfly ballot, there were 5,352 over-vote ballots marked for both Gore and Buchanan, in contrast to only 1,676 marked for both Bush and Buchanan (Another 2,864 voters voted for both Gore and McReynolds). All of these ballots were rejected in the final vote count. Making the logical assumption that the vast majority of Gore/Buchanan ballots were meant for Gore and the vast majority of Bush/Buchanan ballots were meant for Bush, Gore would have netted at least 1,500 additional votes in Palm Beach County had these voters voted as intended.

Finally, the most direct evidence of who the voter intended to vote for when an over-vote was produced would be the writing in of a candidate’s name at the bottom of the ballot. Voters wrote in Gore’s name on 2,182 over-votes, while they wrote in Bush’s name on 1,309 over-votes. Many of these ballots involved two votes for Gore – one next to his name and the other for the write-in candidate, where Gore’s name was added by the voter. All of these ballots were excluded from the vote count. Had these ballots on which the intent of the voter was clearly indicated been counted, Gore would have picked up 873 additional net votes, far more than he needed to win the election.

The bottom line of all this discussion with regard to the question of why the election in Florida was initially called for Gore is that many thousands of voters who thought they were voting for Gore actually voted for Buchanan or Reynolds or produced over-votes that were excluded. These voters would have responded to exit polls by saying they were voting for Gore – hence the initial call for Gore. But as the official vote count became more and more complete, the exit polls became irrelevant to predicting the official election results. That is when the call for Gore was reversed. In other words, the “bad data” was the result of voters who intended to vote for Gore and thought they had voted for Gore, but whose vote, whether or not they wrote Gore’s name on the ballot, was never counted for Gore.

Second bad call – due to an electronic “glitch”
The basis of the second bad call, which caused the networks to make the call for Bush as having won both Florida and the national election, at 2:16 a.m. on Wednesday, November 8, can be explained by the following report:


At 2:09 a.m. Volusia County’s erroneous numbers were added to Voter News Service’s tabulations, and less than ten minutes later Florida and the U.S. election were called for Bush. The error in Volusia County had cost Gore (temporarily) 16,021 votes. Another computer error in Brevard County reduced Gore’s vote total by another 4,000 votes.

After the call was made for Bush, as Jeffrey Toobin writes in his book, "Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six Day Battle to Decide the 2000 election":


The computer glitches in Volusia and Brevard Counties were discovered and corrected, and consequently the TV networks again reversed their call, taking Florida out of the Bush column and calling it “too close to call”, where it remained for several weeks.

The computer error in Volusia Counter was later publicly said to be due to a faulty memory card, with little or no further explanation. It was considered to be accidental, nobody was prosecuted for it, and it stirred up little national attention or concern. The bigger questions are: 1) Were these computer errors purposeful or accidental; and 2) How many other computer errors occurred that night that were not caught?

Probably few people will ever know the answers to these questions. After all, as I will discuss in Chapter 3, the results produced by these electronic voting machines cannot be verified. So unless the errors are massive, as they were in Volusia County, there is little chance of catching them. At least one computer voting expert, Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting, believes she has good evidence that the error was purposeful, though it didn’t work exactly as planned.


Why did the automatic machine recount reduce Bush’s lead by 80% – from 1784 to 327?

In order to understand the 2000 Presidential election and its importance to future elections in our country, it is instructive to understand the reason why the machine recount reduced Bush’s lead by 80%.

The reduction in Bush’s lead following the machine recount was due almost entirely to the addition of Gore votes in counties that used punch card voting machines. As punch card machines get old they become less efficient at what they are supposed to do – punch holes in ballots. Consequently, use of the older machines often results in failures to fully punch a hole in the card. In some cases the hole may be nearly complete, so that a piece of cardboard (called a chad) is barely hanging from the card, in other cases there may be just a small hole in the card, and in still other cases there may be no tear at all, but only a little dimple. The vote counting component of the machine can only count votes for hole punches that are complete, that is, where any remaining cardboard material is not covering the hole. Thus it is that failures to punch complete holes in the card reduce the vote count. But the act of running cards through the machine a second time tends to cause stray pieces of cardboard that are only loosely attached to the card to fall off, thus enabling the machine to read the ballots as votes where the hole is punched.

For a variety of political reasons, poor areas generally have to make do with older machines than wealthier areas. Consequently, poor areas are generally characterized by a much greater number of undervotes (ballots that register no vote because the hole is not complete) than wealthier areas. Since poor areas tend to vote Democratic, that means that Democratic candidates tend to suffer from this problem. Thus it was that as the cards were run through the machine a second time and many of the hanging chads broke off, the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, gained ground.

This is a problem that almost routinely occurs in almost all elections that use the Votomatic punch card voting machines, not just the 2000 Presidential election in Florida.


In my next post in this series I’ll discuss the highly controversial 36 day Florida recount, which ended when the U.S. Supreme Court abruptly ended the vote count and awarded the Florida and thereby the national election to George W. Bush in what many consider to be one of the three worst U.S. Supreme Court decisions in U.S. history.