Breakthrough: Florida vote fraud

I had hoped to go one day without working on a "vote fraud" piece. (They take time, and rent must needs be paid.) So, naturally, on this day a major breakthrough took place.

Researchers at UC Berkeley did some number-crunching on the Florida vote, and discovered that at least 130,000 "extra" votes went to George W. Bush. Everyone's talking about it: Salon, Buzzflash, Democrats.com, The Democratic Underground, Keith Olbermann -- but not Slate, Atrios, Kos, or Joshua Marshall. They'll come around. I hope.

An audio of the press conference can be found here.

A summary of the UC Berkeley analysis -- called the Hout report, after sociology professor Michael Hout -- is here. The full report is here. (Many thanks to a reader named Mark for giving me the last three links in one convenient package.)

The analysis takes us back to Kathy Dopp-land, but with better data. Apparently, the "Dixiecrat" history of various Florida counties is not sufficient to explain the differences between the optical scan vote and the electronic vote. According to Hout:

The three counties where the voting anomalies were most prevalent were also the most heavily Democratic counties, not the [conservative] Dixiecrat counties you’ve all heard about before, but the more heavily Democratic counties that used e-vote technology, including Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade counties in order of magnitude.

As another blogger puts it:

The Hout Report changes a great deal of the landscape. It is a credible, extensive survey by people who do such surveys and statistical analysis for a living.

It should be covered by the mainstream media. And not just Keith Olbermann. This is not a part of this story that should be merely existing on the far left.

Amen, brother!

Would correcting this anomaly change the election? Perhaps not. As Salon notes:

Hout said the researchers applied their same tests to electronic voting in Ohio and discovered no such disparities. And even if the Berkeley researchers are right about Florida, their numbers don't change the overall result of the election there. As things stand now, Bush won Florida by about 311,000 votes. If the 130,000 "extra" votes the Berkeley researchers have found were "ghost votes" – that is, votes that were never cast but simply added to Bush’s total – then Bush's margin would drop to about 181,000 votes. But if the 130,000 votes were Kerry votes that somehow got switched to Bush votes, then Bush’s margin in Florida would drop to 51,000.

Ah, but are we dealing with a mere 130,000 votes? The real number, says Buzzflash, could be twice that. If that is the case, a switch to Kerry deep-sixes Bush's faith-based presidency.

More than that. Proving that vote fraud took place in Florida means -- or should mean -- recounts everywhere. Or better still: An honest revote.

Also of note today:

Daily Kos details evidence of vote fraud in a rural Ohio county, where votes for Bush aren't backed by singatures in the sign-in book (as required by state law).

Wouldn't it be just like Karl Rove and buddies to accuse the Democrats of padding the vote with unauthorized voters, while all the while planning to pad the rural vote in places like Pickaway?

Questions: are the rural conservative voters who came out in droves really just ghosts? Do they exist? And if they exist, did they stay home and did someone else vote for them?

We also discover today that Ken Blackwell is trying to toss out perfectly legit provisional ballots.

There also appears to be a small (or perhap not so small?) epidemic of double-counting in certain Ohio counties.

And for those who still say that the polls predicted a Bush win, here is an excerpt from a good overview in the Orlando Weekly:

Princeton professor Sam Wang, whose meta-analysis had shown the election to be close in the week before the election, began coming up with dramatic numbers for Kerry in the day before and day of the election. At noon EST on Monday, Nov. 1, he predicted a Kerry win by a 108-vote margin.

In the Iowa Electronic Markets, where "investors" put their money where their mouths are and wager real moolah on election outcome "contracts," Bush led consistently for months before the election – often by as much as 60 percent to 39 percent. But at 7 p.m. CST on Nov. 2, 76.6 percent of the last hour's traders had gone to Kerry, with only 20.1 percent plunking their bucks down on Bush. They knew something.

As the first election returns came in, broadcasters were shocked to see that seemingly safe Bush states like Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina were being judged as "too close to call." At 7:28 EST, networks broadcast that both states favored Kerry by 51 percent to 49 percent.

In his research paper, Steven Freeman reports that exit polls showed Kerry had been elected. He was leading in nearly every battleground state, in many cases by sizable margins. But later, in 10 of 11 battleground states, the tallied margins differed from the predicted margins – and in every one the shift favored Bush.

In 10 states where there were verifiable paper trails – or no electronic machines – the final results hardly differed from the initial exit polls. In non-paper-trail states, however, there were significant differences. Florida saw a shift from Kerry up by 1 percent in the exit polls to Bush up by 5 percent at close of voting. In Ohio, Kerry went from up 3 percent to down 3 percent. Exit polls also had Kerry winning the national popular vote by 3 percent.

We are on the brink of a revolution. A mental revolution. We must change the way people in this country think about this election, about the election process. Even if Bush manages to hold onto power, his legitimacy, now as in 2000, will forevermore remain dubious.