Reply #18: Good point

[Time for change]

By percentage of the total vote in the counties, the 41 Triad counties were -0.95% for Kerry compared to Gore. All of the other 47 counties combined were + 2.51%. Calculating it this way (and I agree that this is a better way to present the data), Kerry would pick up only 48,746 votes if the Triad counties had the same percent gain as all of the other counties combined.

However, as I point out in post # 9, above, I believe that the more salient point is that, according to the exit polls, Kerry should have been averaging more than an 8% advantage over Gore in the average Ohio County (He beat Bush in Ohio in the exit polls by 4.2%, whereas Gore lost Ohio by 4%.) This actually happened in only one of the 88 Ohio counties.

Therefore, my belief is that, although most of the fraud took place in the Triad counties, there was probably also widespread fraud in the other counties as well.

In other words, I don't expect this analysis to stand alone by any means. But when taken together with the exit polls (which predicted an overal Kerry victory by a wide margin) and the widespread identification of irregularities in the Triad counties, I feel that this analysis offers good supporting evidence.

With regard to your question about the consistency of the pattern, the answer is that it was not very consistent. I was just reporting the totals. More specifically, if you look at those counties where the Kerry relative deficit was 2.5% or greater, 15 out of those 24 counties used Triad machines, wehereas only 26 of the other 64 counties used Triad machines.