Reply #26: I think that is a weak link in the moss/arnebeck case

[chorti]

They are basing that partly on the judge (Connally) results. But they failed to take into account sufficiently that the judge race was non-partisan.

If you look at where the exit polls did not match the results - yes, it was in SW Ohio, but also in many other parts of the state - far northern Ohio, Cuyahoga, Mahoning, counties just south of Columbus ...

Here is my best guess on Ohio for the major problems:

1. In all of the e-voting counties, the machines were callibrated to favor Bush, i.e. default = Bush and its hard to change to Kerry. This probably switched 2 to 5 percent of all votes in these counties. Anything more would be detectable. Especially affected was Mahoning. Would only need one or two persons to carry out.

2. Voter suppression by lack of machinery. (Not exactly fraud but can't be separated from fraud.) Especially affected were low-income, African-American, Latino and college precincts. See Columbus, Kenyon College, etc. This involved more people at the ground level and may be the best, first place to nail some people's xxx-es.

3. Programmer controlled switching of votes by hacking into tabulators. I believe that this happened in most but not all Triad and ES&S counties. Probably affected 2 to 5 percent of vote being switched in these counties. Anything more would be detectable. I think Hamilton and Butler (ES&S) were especially impacted by this, but it impacted more than 50 counties. A little bit of switching in most precincts is much harder to detect than a lot of switching in a few counties/precincts. You only have to ensure that you pre-select the right precincts to re-count if there is any 3% recount. And that happened in almost every county - after consulting with Triad or ES&S, they almost always preselected the precincts to be used in the 3% recount. Does not necessarily assume local knowledge of fraud.

4. Clever planning (on the part of Repugs) and benign neglect/ignorance (on the part of Dems) in allowing multiple precincts (with different candidate orders) to vote in one location in punch-card counties, causing thousands of votes to be thrown out or mis-votes. This was exacerbated by a lot of local shenanigans on the part of Repugs, but hard to prove - such as moving ballots from one precinct to the other in locations with multiple precincts. Probably impacted 5,000 Kerry votes in Cuyahoga alone.