Article from Oakland Tribune about the Berkley presser

[YellowDoginthehouse]

http://www.oaklandtribune.com/Stories/0,1413,82~1865~2545623,00.html

[The Backlash Cometh]

1. kick

[Straight Shooter]

2. I guess that makes Republicans the "ghost" party

Ghost votes, scary candidates.

[YellowDoginthehouse]

3. kick

kick

[Wordie]

4. Kick

[shelley806]

5. Thanks; interesting article, but I'm confused. I thought the problems

in Florida were the optical scanners. Does anyone have a link to the original report? Not just the news article.

[Zan_of_Texas]

7. original study

I agree -- the work done here at DU indicated the Florida optical scan counties had some of the biggest variances from expected tallies.

So, these UC results were puzzling in light of those results.


Paraphrase of UC Berkeley findings on presidential vote:
The more "blue" a Florida county was in 2000 presidential tallies, the more unexpected "red" votes were observed in 2004, in those Florida counties utilizing electronic voting.

http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/
University of California - Berkeley
UC Data - Data Archive & Technical Assistance
first entry under VOTING

Working Paper:

The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on
Change in Support for Bush
in the 2004 Florida Elections

by Michael Hout, Laura Mangels, Jennifer Carlson, and Rachel Best
With the assistance of the UC Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team
Last revision: 11/18/2004

Summary:

- Irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000 excess votes or more to President George W. Bush in Florida.

- Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for President Bush between 2000 and 2004. This effect cannot be explained by differences between counties in income, number of voters, change in voter turnout, or size of Hispanic/Latino population.

- In Broward County alone, President Bush appears to have received approximately 72,000 excess votes.

- We can be 99.9% sure that these effects are not attributable to chance.

Details:

Because many factors impact voting results, statistical tools are necessary to see the effect of touch-screen voting. Multiple-regression analysis is a statistical technique widely used in the social and physical sciences to distinguish the individual effects of many variables.

This multiple-regression analysis takes account of the following variables by county:
- number of voters
- median income
- Hispanic population
- change in voter turnout between 2000 and 2004
- support for President Bush in 2000 election
- support for Dole in 1996 election

When one controls for these factors, the association between electronic voting and increased support for President Bush is impossible to overlook. The data show with 99.0% certainty that a county’s use of electronic voting is associated with a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush.

The data used in this study come from CNN.com, the 2000 US Census, the Florida Department of State, and the Verified Voting Foundation - all publicly available sources. This study was carried out by a group of doctoral students in the UC Berkeley sociology department in collaboration with Professor Michael Hout, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From the paper, pg. 4: "Essentially, net of other effects, electronic voting had the greatest positive effect in percent voting for Bush from 2000 to 2004 in democratic counties."

The most numerically important of the Florida counties with discrepancies under this model, Hout said, would be: Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade.

From the press conference on Nov. 18, 2004, paraphasing:

Simply put, the more "blue" a Florida county was in 2000 presidential tallies, the more unexpected "red" votes were observed in 2004 in those Florida counties utilizing electronic voting.

~~~~~~~~~~~

PS Here's another story on it.

Researchers: Florida Vote Fishy

by Kim Zetter
Wired.com
12:18 PM Nov. 18, 2004 PT
<http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65757,00.html>

[Wordie]

6. kick