UC Berkeley - The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines....

[sabra]

Thought I would start a new thread in case people didn't see this link posted in another thread...

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http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/

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

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.

....
>>

[MrUnderhill]

1. Doesn't this conflict with our previous research?

Hadn't we learned that the optical scan ballot counties had more dramatic improvement for Bush and that the BBV counties showed little to no movement?

[c-macdonald]

2. No, this is new research (and much more statistically sound)

This takes more variables (instead of just "number of registered repubs/dems") and analyzes the voting trends from 1996 and 2000 and compares them to this year's results.

The study assumes that the 130,733 votes are "ghost" votes - meaning that they are votes that simply appeared out of nowhere and went towards Bush.

They also mentioned though that it is possible these votes were taken from Kerry and given to Bush, which results in 260,000 votes - essentially double the first number.

If the second scenario is correct, the final results would be:

KERRY: 3,714,277
BUSH: 3,833,789

Still a difference of 119,512 votes.