Florida voting machines rigged?

Kathy Dopp has posted an analysis of Florida's election results by county, as compared to expected results based on voter registration data. She notices that in counties which use optical scanner machines, the Republican turnout tended to be quite large, percentage-wise, compared to the Democratic turnout, whereas in counties which use touch-screen machines, there does not seem to be an overall pattern in terms of which voters turned out in greater numbers:

So, were the optical machines rigged?

First of all, I have compiled a map of which counties in Florida use optical vs. touch-screen tabulation machines, using the CNN Election 2004 map as a template:



Then, I created a map based on the turnout for each county as compared to the expected turnout from the voter registration rolls. The exact formula is:

(Bush votes / registered Republicans) - (Kerry votes / registered Democrats)

Say, for example, that there are 100 Republicans and 160 Democrats in a fictional Norfolk county. On Election Day, 80 votes are recorded for Bush and 100 for Kerry. That's a turnout rate of 80.0% for Republicans and 62.5% for Democrats. Subtract the latter from the former and you get a result of 17.5%.

If your result is positive, you color the county that shade of red (up to 100%), or blue if negative (down to -100%). In the example case, Norfolk county would be colored a light shade of red.

Here is that map, side-by-side with the voting machine map:



Notice that those areas which turned out unexpectedly well for Kerry form a ring around the southern coast of Florida. Most of those counties use touch-screen machines! Further, there's a cluster of five counties just inland from the coast which had high Bush vote counts relative to the Republican registration rolls, and used optical machines. Does this support the notion that the optical machines were rigged for Bush?

In other words, is there a pattern where counties which use optical vote-counting machines report irregularly high turnout for Bush, as compared to neighboring counties which use touch-screen machines?

Well, let's see. There's another cluster of touch-screen machines right in the center of Florida. Did they lean more towards Kerry than their neighboring counties? Looking at the map, there is no evidence that that is the case. Finally, Nassau county in the northeast corner of Florida uses a touch-screen machine, yet it reported a higher Republican-Democrat difference in turnout than the counties directly below it, which all use optical machines.

So so far, it seems that there just happen to be a bunch of counties on the southern tip which shifted unexpectedly to Kerry, and also happened to have touch-screen voting machines. Yes, that is a coincidence, but there's no larger pattern regarding the machines themselves, nor are there enough counties with touch-screen voting machines to detect a meaningful pattern even if there were one.

But what explains the extremely high voter turnout for Republicans in the northern counties, and in that county cluster inland from the southern coast? Actually, the turnout wasn't that high. If you base the map on total votes minus expected votes, rather than divided by, you get a wholly different picture:



So you see, there are only three counties which contributed substantially to Bush's victory in Florida, as compared to the expectations based on the voter rolls: Duval county in the northeast, which contains the densely-populated city of Jacksonville; and the Polk and Hillsborough counties in the center of Florida, one of which even used a touch-screen voting system! Two out of three using optical machines is not statistically meaningful.

In other words, all the northern counties colored deep red by the first map are very sparsely populated, and in fact many of them have such a low number of registered Republicans as compared to registered Democrats, that a shift in a couple hundred votes could cause them to be colored deep red even if the county itself had more people vote for Kerry than for Bush, since a couple hundred votes would constitute over 200% turnout for Bush as compared to the number of registered Republicans.

Also, many Floridians are old, and chose their party registration decades ago. There are certainly a large number of socially conservative people who registered as a Democrat years ago, but now find themselves voting Republican. Sort of the "Zel Miller" type of Democrat, or "Dixiecrat" as they're sometimes called (in fact, Dixie is the name of one of the Florida counties exhibiting that very result).

Notice also that, barring the five southern exceptions, every county which is colored deep red on the first map is located in the northern section of Florida. Also note that there is only one county in that northern section which actually uses a touch-screen machine, and it does not report any larger Republican-Democratic turnout ratio than its neighboring counties. Therefore, the entire anomaly is geographically-based. If you removed those northern counties, the anomaly would essentially disappear. And since there are basically no touch-screen machines in northern Florida, you have no way to actually control for geography.

To conclude, there is simply no pattern here that remains when you control for geographic location. Kathy does note that:


However, doing a simple geographic map of the counties, as I did, should be the first thing one should think of when you're considering the possibility of voter fraud, before you say:


Certainly Kathy made no explicitly false claims, and there's nothing wrong with asking questions, but I can only guess at what causes someone to be so curious as to be stumbling around in the dark looking for conspiracies like these. I attribute it to the irrational "Bush stole the election" mentality which has permeated the left since 2000.

It's sad, too, because when real fraud happens, how are well-meaning people supposed to know? We're so used to tuning out the conspiracy theories.

Well, I didn't read the whole articles, but as one of the residents lefties here, allow me to say- I don't think fraud lost Kerry the election. I think he ran a shitty campaign. That is all.

Berard

Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that this was prevalent on the left right now. Most people seem to be accepting this graciously, Kerry certainly included.

David,

Well done.

But I believe it's no the whole story. I played with the numbers and there's another interesting trend. If you look at number of voters per county, you will see that there's a clear tendency that % change is correlated with population size. And it happened, that all counties with population size under 40K have only one type of voting machine. Note, that extreme results never happen for counties wirh large populations.

Adam

I have just done a statistical analysis of CO votes, and there is definitely something fishy going on with Optical Scanniung machines. There are very glaring statistical anamolies when comparing 200 results to 2004 results

To make clear -- I think what we see in the data is some natural trend not linked to voting machines. Size of population in a county is highly corelated with its social pattern (rural vs. urban, etc...). In FL it simply happens to correlate with type of machine, as David shown.

Rajiv -- 'definitely something fishy' is nothinf else than your subjective opinion. You need to present data and the ststistical analysis to support you claim.

Adam

I am in the process of getting the staistical analysis vetted, and I will get it to you once done. But the anamolies seem to point to ced
rtain paradoxical CO results that have been commented on at DailyKos
Bush got 52% to Kerry's
Salazar got 51% of the vote to Coors 47%
For the first time in 50 years, Dems control both state houses.
In the Presidential race Urban areas had a huge shift to Kerry compared to Gore+Nader votes in 2000. However, the rural counties are showing a shift to Bush by a greater margin, yet it doesn't show in the other races. The Std Devs, coefficient of variation and other statistics are very different, consistent with a near unvarying shift of 4% (as if 4% of Democratic votes had been counted as republican votes)

Will let you know as I finalize the analysis. I could ofcourse be very wrong

A quote from Kathy Dopp who compiled those statistics (The woman you met briefly, Steve, the night you got into town just as she was leaving):

http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm

"Note: This is a scientific study. Small op-scan counties must be excluded for valid analysis. This relationship with voting machines is statistically significant. No conclusions as to the causes of the pattern can be drawn at this time."

I, like you, am not happy with the results of this election. I also do not trust the administration to play fair. I also think to not have a paper trail that allows a meaningful recount is very suspicious and cuts at the heart of democracy, vitally wounding confidence in elections. However, these statistics are not enough at this time to prove ballot stuffing or election rigging. There are other possible explanations. One mentioned by David Schneider-Joseph in his weblog:

http://www.davidsj.com/post.php?id=171_0_1_0_C#comments

"Also, many Floridians are old, and chose their party registration decades ago. There are certainly a large number of socially conservative people who registered as a Democrat years ago, but now find themselves voting Republican. Sort of the "Zel Miller" type of Democrat, or "Dixiecrat" as they're sometimes called (in fact, Dixie is the name of one of the Florida counties exhibiting that very result)."

The counties with the huge unexpected gains for republicans tend to be very small. It is not unimaginable that for whatever reason, (more convincing TV ads? more effective voter transportation? person to person persuasion?) large numbers of independants and democrats in Florida voted for Bush.

It will be interesting to see what else the mathematicians come up with and if they find anything that *does* yield credible conclusions. *If* the election was stolen, I sure want that fact to come out and the perpetrators to be held accountable.

It would be interesting to see an independant, credible polling firm conduct a survey on a few of those Florida suprise counties. If things still seem screwy after a survey asking: 1. Did you vote? and 2. Who did you vote for? then maybe there is something here. The exit polls favoring Kerry slightly statewide just don't cut it because there are possible explanations there too. It just might be that for whatever reason people who voted for Bush were less likely to respond to exit polling or were afraid to admit that they voted for him. A post election poll where the person answers in the privacy of his own home and is targeted to those counties where Kerry was "expected" to win by a landslide but didn't might reveal if the actual election results are credible.

-Daniel

www.livejournal.com/~sumra

--- In ICCPolitics@yahoogroups.com, "Steve Moyer - metamind.us/steve" <nodesnetwork@g...> wrote:
> Florida's election was a total sham. Check this out:
>
> http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/VRWC/gun.htm
>
> This election was STOLEN by the republicans.
>
> Steve Moyer

If I might be so bold, I would like to submit my (ongoing) analysis:

The Florida Vote "Irregularities"

I'm glad someone else finally said it -- a person's political party affiliation is not always what makes them decide who they want for President.

Many local political races in the South favor Democrats -- and in order to have say in the primaries, you have to be registered as a Democrat. But that does not mean that they will neccessarily vote Republican in the presidential race.

I noticed in the small counties in Florida that there were few registered Independents percentage-wise to the larger cities. This leads back to elderly populations having been registered as the same party for decades in the rural areas, the people most likely to vote Republican if the Democratic presidential candidate seems too liberal.

The objection has been raised -- "Well, exit polling says only 10% of Democrats voted Republican, why in these small areas do you have over half of them voting Republican?" Exit polling is done by self-identification, and many people will call themselves Independents when they are in fact registered with another party affiliation.

Trying to coorelate party registration with presidential vote is fruitless, and a logical fallacy. Thank you for explaining it quite well.

If we really believe fraud took place, we need to scrutinize EVERY bit of data, and make sure that we aren't leaping to conclusions. "If I can shoot down one theory, they must all be wrong" is the opinion of most people when they read what they call "conspiracy theories". Therefore, if we're going to make accusations we need to scrutinize them very carefully before passing them around as gospel.

Have you seen the news for Franklin County Indiana? Democrat and Libertarian votes counts were interchanged by optical scanning "glitch". A hand recount changed the election result.

The votes between Democrats and Libertarians were
exchanged by optical scanner. Statistical evidence
may point to interchange of Republican and Democrat votes
in Florida op-scan counties - could it be the same
thing? A reversal of the counties in question would result in a Kerry electora win.

The Franklin county result is important because it provides a mechanism by which votes are interchanged by optical scanning machines - a change to an entry in a database.

Check the Indiana Star:

http://www.qctimes.com/internal.php?story_id=1039447&t=Local+News&c=2,1039447

Your comment "Notice that those areas which turned out unexpectedly well for Kerry form a ring around the southern coast of Florida." is innacurate. please see the simple analysis at http://liberty.hypermart.net/voices/2004/text/Comparison_of_Democratic_and_Republican_Populations_and_Vote_Counts_in_Florida_from_2000_to_2004.htm In comparing 2000 to 2004 Democratic vote counts relative to registration changes did better in norther counties than in the south.



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