Default to Bush who did vote but not for president (blank voters)

[DrDebug]

I can't seem to find anything about it in the postings and web so far.

There must have been people who voted for the issues and not for the president and that should be considered a valid vote. I looked at some of the county reports and it seems that 0.1-0.5% of the people voted blank for the president, so it's a tiny group but it is a possibility.

Does anybody know if there any inconsistencies known for people who wanted to vote blank on president, but saw their vote defaulted to Bush or who were completely unable to vote for blank for president.

Or whether somebody tried to vote blank for District Court Griffin, Amendment LXIV or Soil Water District and was unable to do so...

[Dancing_Dave]

1. Undervotes, phantom votes and defaults

In any particular race there are at least a few "undervotes". A few people might not have wanted to vote for any of the canidates for President, but nevertheless turned up to vote because of their interest in some other race, such as Senator, etc.

Of course, the percentage of voter-intentional undervotes in a Presidential race is always tiny.

A strange thing that was noted in the New Mexico election was that their was a very unusally high level undervotes in the most stongly democratic areas--Hispanic and Native American. This also correlated with the kind of voting machines used there, so it seems that some firm had a contract to take some of these voters out. Meanwhile, in many other precincts there was the equally incredible situation of absolutely 0 undervotes. These are the districts where "Default to Bush" could be in operation.

Even one Phantom vote is always a big red flag and a dead canary in the coal mine. Phantom votes occur where there were more votes for President that people who signed in to vote. We've all heard about the outrageous case in Ohio where Bush got thousands of votes from precinct with under one thousand registered voters total.

Any firm with a contract to rig and election would want phantom votes to be cancelled out by undervotes. Thus, it would not be in their interest to rig ALL voting machines to "Default to Bush" because such a machine simply CANNOT produce any undervotes.

One computer science explanation of phantom votes is that they occur when there is a glitch in vote switching software.

The Republican explanation of phantom votes is that these are votes that Santa gave to Dubya for Christmas. Ho, ho, ho on you, all American suckers!

[Carolab]

2. In Mahoning County Ohio

based on EIRS reporting, the majority of machines were default to Bush but some were default to blank. Thus voters for Kerry where Kerry was iniitally chosen but the voter didn't notice that the vote later switched to Bush would go to either Bush or blank, depending on the machine default. Kerry would lose all of them, but the undervotes would not look as unusual. The default to blank might also be considered less suspicious than the default to Bush pattern and be less likely to be reported to the hotline system, which most voters were not familiar with. A focused search of the Florida EIRS data has confirmed the same pattern also exists in Florida, especially Broward County. Several computers defaulted to blank after Kerry was initially chose as seen in the EIRS cases.

http://www.flcv.com/fraudpat.html

[dewaldd]

3. ummm...why should there even be a default?

[emlev]

4. Details about default to Bush in Mahoning County, OH

See statistician Richard Hayes Phillips's study on Mahoning County and the default to Bush issue at:

http://web.northnet.org/minstrel/youngstown.htm