Electronic Vote Switching from Kerry to Bush - 9:1 swing state ratio

[Time for change]

This is a cross post to a thread I just posted on GDP:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2020121

In May of this year, I did an analysis of the U.S. Electronic Incident Reporting System (EIRS) database (for the 2004 presidential election), in which I showed that incidents of "electronic vote switching" that favored Bush outnumbered incidents that favored Kerry by a ratio of greater than 12:1 – there were 87 incidents that favored Bush, and 7 that favored Kerry.

My conclusions were:
1. The probability of such a lopsided ratio in favor of Bush was extremely unlikely
2. Although it was possible that these results could be explained by a reporting bias, whereby Kerry voters were more likely to report incidents than Bush voters, it seemed highly unlikely that this could result in such a large ratio.
3. Therefore, election fraud (i.e., purposeful programming of the computers to switch votes from Kerry to Bush) would seem to be by far the most likely explanation for these findings.

Recently, mgr has suggested that another way to test these conclusions would be to compare the rate of vote switches in swing states vs. non-swing states. It seems probable that Republicans would target election fraud in states that were likely to have influence on who won the election. Therefore, if the rate is much greater in swing states than in non-swing states, that would provide confirmatory evidence that bias was a highly unlikely explanation for the lopsided ratio of vote switches in favor of Bush.

Go to above link for a description of this study.

[ordinaryaveragegirl]

1. "Your election results..."

"...Brought to you by Diebold and Friends."

I found another interesting link about all of these companies, and of course, most of them are big Repuke supporters. Chuck Hagel, of course, owns ESS, so no conflict of interest there. *smirk*

It seems like fraud was a given, since many of these machines don't leave a paper trail, and it makes it hard to backtrack things like the following:

Unusual Results: In the areas where computers were used to cast votes or tally them, some very strange results have surfaced. In just one county in Ohio, over 97,000 votes were originally cast than there are registered voters. Since then they have "corrected" the numbers but mysteriously, the total vote for the county did not change. In one precinct in Florida it was discovered that when the votes hit 32,000, a machine started to count backwards. Many people reported that when they tried to vote for Kerry, the screen said they voted for Bush. There are over 50,000 complaints like this registered. If you view the complaints which are available online, it is clear that almost every one resulted in a "glitch" that favored Bush. And for every "glitch" that has surfaced, we have no idea how many have not been noticed.

More here: http://www.solarbus.org/stealyourelection/stolen-election-intro.html

[Time for change]

2. The reference to "50,000 complaints like this one" is important

Do you know the source or details for that?

[Fly by night]

6. I thought EIRS received 45,000+ reports, though your report says fewer.

It would also be useful for you to communicate with Common Cause, which received (as I remember) close to 200,000 complaints to their hotline. PM me and I will give you their Election Reform chairman's name and email address. You should also review berniew1's postings on his EIRS analyses, which are probably all in the 2004 ERD archives by now. I can give you his name and email address also if you PM me.

Thanks again for this new analysis. It is very convincing.

[Time for change]

7. Well, that's surprising

When I compiled my data in May of this year, there were 28,734 reports in EIRS. Since that was several months after the election, it didn't occur to me that reports would subsequently be added. The current total is 42,775.

However, my analysis dealt with only a small subset of this total -- election day machine problems. I note in my post that there were 2,115 machine problems reported. At this time the database indicates 2,396 machine problems, though only 2,269 of them were from election day. So it appears that since I compiled my data for this study in May, a small number of relevant cases may have been added. I didn't go back to check because it never occurred to me that election day problems would be added to the database at such a late date.

Anyhow, I'll pm you for the information, thanks.

[Land Shark]

3. If fraud is party-driven or activist-driven, swing states might be chosen

but if it is vendor driven, then the vendor may well wish to have all their machines operate the same so that any problem, if detected, can be "rationally" ascribed to technical glitches. Thus vendor driven fraud would not be restricted to swing states per se.

While I am agnostic on this causation issue, it is interesting that Sequoia has Nevada and New Mexico, and both were very close and would have resulted in an electoral college tie even without ohio. Sequoia has machines and expecially tabulators in Florida. There's one county in WA state that has sequoia that has been studied, and more than one in CA but neither of those states were particularly swing states (though WA was supposed to have been, for a while, then the Repubs pulled out).

So while it woudld be interesting to look at swing v non-swing to narrow down some issues, it would be preferable to see about 3-5 different approaches in the same study (another being reports by vendor, etc)

[Time for change]

4. I do mention vendors in the article

ESS: 51%
Sequoia: 22%
Danaher: 16%
Diebold: 8%

The percentages of incidents are roughly proportional to the frequency of use.

I don't know what it all means. My understanding is that the vendors are very tight with each other, as well as the Republican Party. But I'm certainly no expert on this matter.

[kster]

5. kick.nt

[Time for change]

8. This study has been posted by the 'Ohio Project' on

"Ohio Election Fraud" at

http://fairnessbybeckerman.blogspot.com/2005/08/articles-and-commentary-on-2004.html

:)