"No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained," said Hout."
see: http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/ November 18, 2004

See also Dopp study: http://uscountvotes.org November 5 , 2004

See also Freeman study: Freeman, Steven F., PhD. “The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy.” Buzzflash (November 11, 2004),
http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/11/ale04090.html.

See 2001 study, for crying out loud:
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/Jordan-Daw...


Bush's fifth ace: A crooked Panhandle
Plop some green eyeshades on blind Bob Butterworth
by Elizabeth Jordan and Oliver Dawshed

". . .What we found was implausible enough to justify an investigation by law enforcement authorities. Precinct level information from 11 northern counties revealed that two parameters which can be logically connected to electoral fraud (ballot spoilage and the number of Gore votes divided by the number of Nelson votes) account for two-thirds of the variation in Gore's performance; the chances of this happening by chance are about 1 in 1047 (10 raised to the 47th power). This was true in aggregate as well as individually. Each of the eleven northern counties that we studied had patterns consistent with cheating by Republicans. These were Bay, Bradford, Calhoun, Columbia, Dixie, Gulf, Hamilton, Jackson, Suwanee, Union, and Washington. Precincts in some counties had discard rates of up to 40 percent of ballots cast! Calhoun and Dixie showed profiles possibly suggestive of ballot box stuffing. We suggest that the most consistent explanation of the statistical anomalies is a pattern of criminal tampering with ballots, primarily (but not necessarily exclusively) by Republicans. In just 14 suspicious precincts with suspiciously high ballot discard rates, 844 ballots for Gore were destroyed in excess of what would be expected. In the 11 counties, the total number of Gore ballots involved is probably in the tens of thousands, our model suggests that 7,100 votes may have been destroyed, so the number destroyed in all northern counties may have been many tens of thousands...."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111904W.shtml


Additionally: Berkeley web site: http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/

Editor's Note | A copy of the working paper, raw data and other information used in the study described below can be found here. - wrp

Go to Original

UC Berkeley Research Team Sounds 'Smoke Alarm' for Florida E-Vote Count

by UC Berkeley

Thursday 18 November 2004

Research team calls for investigation.

Today the University of California's Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team released a statistical study - the sole method available to monitor the accuracy of e- voting - reporting irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods - what the team says can be deemed a "smoke alarm." Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance - the probability is less than 0.1 percent. The research team formally disclosed results of the study at a press conference today at the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center, where they called on Florida voting officials to investigate.

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

"For the sake of all future elections involving electronic voting - someone must investigate and explain the statistical anomalies in Florida," says Professor Michael Hout. "We're calling on voting officials in Florida to take action."

The research team is comprised of doctoral students and faculty in the UC Berkeley sociology department, and led by Sociology Professor Michael Hout, a nationally-known expert on statistical methods and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center.

For its research, the team used multiple-regression analysis, a statistical method widely used in the social and physical sciences to distinguish the individual effects of many variables on quantitative outcomes like vote totals. This multiple-regression analysis takes into account of the following variables by county:

· number of voters
· median income
· Hispanic/Latino population
· change in voter turnout between 2000 and 2004
· support for Senator Dole in the 1996 election
· support for President Bush in the 2000 election
· use of electronic voting or paper ballots

"No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained," said Hout. "The study shows, that a county's use of electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this appearing in a population where the true difference is zero - less than once in a thousand chances."

The data used in this study came from public sources including CNN.com, the 2000 US Census, and the Verified Voting Foundation. For a copy of the working paper, raw data and other information used in the study can be found at: http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/


Informant: Marsha V. Hammond