Nov 05, 2004

by Scoop Co-Editor, Alastair Thompson

Within parts of the U.S. progressive community there is already widespread concern that electronic voting fraud may provide an explanation for the astonishing 8 million vote gain made by George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential U.S. election.

Already there a variety of odd phenomena which have aroused suspicions about this possibility:

For example:

- In Florida Bush received a million extra votes, while Kerry received only 500,000 extra votes, in spite of a massive Democratic Get-Out-The-Vote(GOTV) and registration campaign in that state;

- In Florida's Broward County, a democratic stronghold and heavily black community, unauditable voting machines recorded a 33% (70,000+) vote gain on Bush's 2000 results and a much smaller gain to Kerry - again Broward was the scene of a massive GOTV campaign;

- In several places voters reported
http://www.infozine.com/news/stories/op/storiesView/sid/4154/ voting for Kerry but noticing the machine record their vote for Bush;

- Recollections, reported here at Scoop.co.nz in 2003, that there is evidence of vote fraud in Florida in 2000 involving security holes in voting systems;

- Observations that many of the security flaws reported in mid 2003 in vote counting systems remained in place for the 2004 count last night (see. http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ for details.)

But by far the most wide source of public suspicion about the results came from the stark difference between the exit polls, which showed strong Kerry leads in many battleground states including Ohio and Florida, and the actual results in those same states. Bush achieved a 5% margin of victory in Florida and came very close to winning Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Add in the fact that the reported exit poll results were changed in the early hours of Wednesday morning, and there was a recipe for suspicion brewing in the online internet vote fraud community last night.

In order to attempt to get a firmer hold on the extent of vote fraud if it did occur Faun Otter (a veteran of the U.S. based vote fraud investigative community) conducted the following preliminary analysis comparing the initial exit poll results (note this link takes you to the revised results) vs actual results.

Analysis Of Exit Polls Vs. Supposed Ballot Counts
Method,

Grab one site which lists the exit polls before they were "corrected."

(Correction is the procedure by which the exit polls are retrofitted to match the figures provided by the vote counting machines. It is easily done by changing the exit poll results, such as the 2.00 a.m. flip-flop of the Nevada exit poll scores which was done without any change to the sample size. A slightly less obvious sleight of hand is to alter the weighting. Weighting is the name for a multiplier used to correct sample subgroups to match the proportions in the whole of a state population. Thus an exit poll can be 'corrected' by saying something to the effect,

"Oh well, the vote results show we must have under sampled Republicans and therefore we'll multiply that subgroup of the exit poll sample by 1.5 to make our results fit the figures the ballot counting machines are spitting out.")

Here is one list as an example of raw (pre-correction) exit poll data:

http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=386

[Note another list was published on Scoop.co.nz HERE - Scoop editor]

Then take a look at the results by state, such as on this chart:

http://news.yahoo.com/electionresults

There is a bit of math involved but don't worry, I taught market research at a University - a place where Republicans fear to tread, according to the media's own polls! The Bush people argue that the exit polls are skewed by the methodology employed. It is odd that they don't say what that error producing part of the methodology might be. A skew means a systematic error is introduced by the test protocol and causes a consistent shift in one direction.

IF this was true, then all the exit polls would show the same sort of shift from 'actual' results.

The GOP offer an alternative argument that the exit polls are not large enough samples and therefore the results are off by a large random error.

IF this was true, then the exit polls should scatter on either side of the actual result, especially if the final result is close to 50/50.

So what do we actually see when comparing exit polls with actual results?

There is skew - but ONLY in states which the Republicans had previously stated to be target states in play. The skew is in the same direction every time; that is to say in favor of Bush.

The exit poll results are not scattered about the mean as the alternative theory predicts.

They are all on the Kerry side of the vote counts as issued by the states except for a hand full of states which hit amazingly close to the exit poll figures.

Here are the figures. They list the four contemporaneous and uncorrected exit polls. Kerry is listed first and Bush second in each pair of figures. Published = the figure presented as the vote count as of 10.00 a.m. EST on 11/3/04


Arizona
Poll one 45-55 Final 45-55 Published 44-55
Colorado
Poll one 48-51 2nd 48-50 3rd 46-53 Published 46-53

Louisiana
Poll one 42-57 Final 43-56 Published 42-57

Michigan
Poll one 51-48 Published 51-48 Published 51-48

Iowa
Poll one 49-49 3rd 50-48 Final 49-49 Published 49-50

New Mexico
Poll one 50-48 2nd 50-48 3rd 50-48 Final 50-49 Published 49-50

Maine 3rd poll 55-44 Published 53-45

Nevada:
3rd poll 48-49 Published 48-51

Arkansas:
3rd poll 45-54 Published 45-54

Missouri
Final 46-54 Published 46-53

These tracking polls were right where you would expect them to be and within the margin of error. However, if we look at some other states, the figures are beyond curious. either the exit polls were wrong or the vote count is wrong:


Wisconsin
Poll one 52-48 3rd 51-46 Final 52-47 Published 50-49
Pennsylvannia
Poll one 60-40 3rd 54-45 Final 53-46 Published 51-49

Ohio
Poll one 52-48 2nd 50-49 3rd 50-49 Final 51-49 Published 49-51

Florida
Poll one 51-48 2nd 50-49 3rd 50-49 Final 51-49 Published 47-52

Minnesota
Poll one 58-40 3rd 58-40 Final 54-44 Published 51-48

New Hampshire
Poll one 57-41 3rd 58-41 Published 50-49

North Carolina
Poll one 3rd 49-51 Final 48-52 Published 43-56

Taking the figures and measuring the size and direction of the poll to supposed vote count discrepancy, we find the variance between the exit poll and the final result:


Wisconsin
Bush plus 4%
Pennnsylvannia
Bush plus 5%

Ohio
Bush plus 4%

Florida
Bush plus 7%

Minnesota
Bush plus 7%

New Hampshire
Bush plus 15%

North Carolina'
Bush plus 9%

In summary election results appear to have been tampered with to give Bush some unearned electoral votes.

http://www.jihadunspun.com/intheatre_internal.php?article=100380&list=/home.php


Informant: Lotus