Florida hand recount of 3 counties; does anyone have more details?

[berniew1]

Miami Herald hand recount of 3 Florida counties indicates signficant Kerry gain and possible Kerry win in Florida
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/20021...

Here are the tallies for Union County:

Bush original: 3396 Bush hand count: 3393 (-3)

Kerry original: 1251 Kerry hand count: 1272 (+21)

Net change: Kerry +24

Here are the tallies for Lafayette County:

Bush original: 2460 Bush hand count: 2452 (-8)

Kerry original: 845 Kerry hand count: 848 (+3)

Net change: Kerry +11

It's a bit more complicated for the third county they looked at, Suwannee County, because they only report the totals for a hand

count of "almost 60%" of the ballots. Here is the result of their 60% hand count:

Bush 60% hand count: 6140

Kerry 60% hand count: 2984

Which gives us the following tally for Suwannee County:

Bush original: 11153 Extrapolation of Bush 100% hand count: 10549

Kerry original: 4522 Extrapolation of Kerry 100% hand count: 5126

Net change: Kerry +1208

In the original count, 71.2% of the votes cast for Bush or Kerry (n=15675) went to Bush. In the hand count, this drops to 67.3%. That

is a significant drop. Let's translate that into numbers. If you take the percentages from the hand count and extrapolate, here's

what you get:

Bush = 15675 x .673 = 10549 (loss of 604)

Kerry = 15675 x .327 = 5126 (gain of 604)

Net change: Kerry +1208

A switch of 1208 votes in a county with less than 16K votes cast is obviously huge. Now maybe there's a very large percentage of Bush votes in that remaining 40% that they didn't count, but we can't know that because they didn't count them. Which begs the question...why did they stop counting in Suwannee County when their tabulation of 60% of the ballots deviated so much from the original total? And without actually counting those remaining ballots, how can they possibly report that nothing is amiss when the data they have so far suggests a possible problem?

What I see is a possible gain of 1243 votes for Kerry from three small counties in which only 23627 ballots were cast. That

represents about 0.3% of the ballots cast for Bush and Kerry statewide. If Kerry gained votes at the same rate statewide, he picks up nearly 400,000 votes and wins Florida.

another source:

http://ap.indystar.com/dynamic/stories/F/FLORIDA_VOTING?SITE=ININS&SECTION=POLITICS&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

[berniew1]

1. Does anyone have details for numbers in Suwannee County?

The original source of the data is no longer there; does anyone have access to the data to check all the details of the numbers in Suwannee County?

[DoYouEverWonder]

5. I have a hard copy

of the 'unofficial' election results from their website on 11/17/04.

I also spoke briefly to the SOE there.

The Miami Herald counted only the precincts that they wanted to count. However, looking at the demographics the voter registrations and population seems to be pretty evenly spread except for precinct #1 that went heavily in Kerry's favor. My guess is that was the black part of town?

However, since the rest of the county is pretty homogeneous, your figures should hold up.

[MrUnderhill]

6. They counted the precincts that went most heavily for Kerry

Which is what you would want them to do (short of recounting the whole county/state).

Virtually the entire discrepancy was in "spoiled" ballots that they could discern the will of the voter where the machines could/did not. Obviously, the precincts with the highest Kerry vote would be the ones most likely to produce extra Kerry votes.

[DoYouEverWonder]

9. There is no way to know without counting the whole county

I would tend to suspect the precincts that went heavy to Bush, which were the precincts that they avoided.

[MrUnderhill]

2. Sorry. I'm afraid it doesn't work that way.

Just like some counties lean more left or right than others... precincts WITHIN counties can have substantial differences as well.

You can't take 60% of a county and extrapolate it to reflect the full county and assume that 1200 vote gain.

What they did was only count (about) half of the precincts. But they then compared their hand count results for those precincts to the reported count. There was almost no variation.

[bemis12]

4. I counted one house.

Both adults voted Kerry.

That extrapolates out to a 100% vote for Kerry in Florida. Carrying it further, I don't think Bush got any US votes at all.

[Woody Box]

3. The case has already been investigated here:

Suwannee County: How the Miami Herald was fed with incomplete data

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=93139&mesg_id=93139

[Woody Box]

7. Another link with nice graphics

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=97212&mesg_id=97212

Miami Herald: "Randomly chosen precincts"

[spotbird]

8. That recount set out to prove everything was fine.

As far as the authors are concerned it achieved that goal.

One thing that was amazing was the emails someone here posted from one of the reporters, these people aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer. Reading the reporters questions brought home the fact that half the population really is below average.