Reply #52: The short answer to your question ....

[Iceburg]

"Is it possible that the order of presidential candidates was carefully planned so that Kerry votes would slip to Bush, not to any other candidate on the ticket? ...YES!!!

A carefully planned operation to switch ballots (some not all -- that would be to obvious) that minimizes risk of being caught would have to occur in the voting locations that had
a) multiple precincts
b) 2 or more unique ballot order arrangements
c) Kerry's relative position on ballot X equal to Bush's relation position on ballot Y

A,B, and C are necessary conditions for shuffling votes without getting into machine tabulation tampering and involving many staff. Although if machines are swapped out of a precinct (due to planned failures)that of course opens the door to another method of shuffling the vote and it is highly likely they used both methods. The bottom line is that without programmatic tampering of the machine tabulators one only needs to have the ballot read by the wrong machine, or the wrong ballot fed into the right machine. Swapping machines is just a special case of the ballot shuffle -- no re-programming is required.

Now back to the necessary conditions:
To minimize the risk of failure we require multiple precincts collocated in a voting location where at least 2 distinct ballot orders and they are ordered in such a manner that Kerry's position on ballot is interchangeable with W's position on another ballot.

As you know, there are 5 and 5 only ballot order arrangements in Cuyahoga:
1)BKxyz
2)zBKxy
3)yzBKx
4)xyzBK
5)KxyzB

Where B=Bush K=Kerry x=disqualified y=Peroutka z=Badnarik

Note that the relative candidate position to another candidate remains constant for all ballots in Cuyahoga County. Kerry's position is always adjacent to Bush although on the final rotation it appears that Kerry and Bush are separated, mathematically speaking they are adjacent because the series repeats itself.

Thus in voting areas with 2 distinct ballot orders, these 5 ballot order pairs qualify as easy switches:
..1.....2.....3.....4.....5
BKxyz BKxyz zBKxy yzBKx xyzBK
KxyzB zBKxy yzBKx xyzBK KxyzB

So if I give the Kerry voter
a) the wrong template, he punches for Bush.
b) the wrong ballot, he punches for Bush.
c) the right template & right ballot but direct him to the wrong tabulator, he in essence voted Bush
etc.
If halfway through the day, the tabulator for precinct X breaks down and is replaced by one that was programmed to read ballot order Y then again the Kerry votes are shifted to Bush.

In the above pairings we would see no change in votes cast versus ballot order arrangements to the third part votes.(That smells) Which is exactly what my graph illustrates.

So what we need to know in what locations were machines swapped out due to "malfunction".

Were any staff rotated from one voting area to another? I do believe that there needs to be at least one person involved in the skulduggery.

If ballot switching did occur, it is unlikely that the perpetrators made any effort to cover their tracks on the other races/contests such as the Ban on Gay Marriage issue. I have found some data that suggests the % votes cast do not jive with the bush% increases. More on that later.