Reply #79: Psephos votomatic machines highest error rate FL 2000 [View All]

[Mandate My Ass]

Tom Rapp, president sold some on eBay. They were in most of the contested counties.

Here's a Rasmussen overview of voting problems in FL 2000

10. Voting Machine Choice
Which counties chose to use the kinds of voting machines that have low spoilage? The variable explained below is whether a county used one of the three ballot types discovered earlier to have high spoilage rates: Optical_Central_ESS, Punchcard_Votomatic, or Punchcard_Datavote. For this we must use a logit regression, since OLS is unsuitable when the variable to be explained takes just values of 0 and 1 rather than a continuous range (though here, OLS happens to yield essentially the same results.)
There are 67 observations, and the pseudo-R-squared is .25. ("Pseudo" because logit does not generate the standard R-squared of ordinary least squares.) The table below shows the coefficient (which is not straightforward to interpet in a logit regression), the z-statistic, and the simple correlation between that variable and whether a county used a low- spoilage ballot. Regression coefficients significant at the 10 percent level are starred.






http://www.rasmusen.org/special/elections/spoiled.htm#PRECINCT

A Palm Beast Post article bears this out too.



"Of more than 6.1 million ballots cast in the 2000 election, more than 176,000, or 2.9 percent, weren't counted in the presidential race — either because voters skipped the race, tried and failed to mark their ballots for a candidate, or spoiled their ballots by over-voting. Uncounted ballots included more than 112,000 over-votes and more than 61,000 under-votes.

In Palm Beach County and the 14 other counties that used Votomatics or similar punch-card machines, a combined 3.8 percent of ballots went uncounted in the presidential race.

Within Palm Beach County itself, 6.4 percent of ballots were uncounted. There were 19,147 over-votes, many the result of confusion over the county's two-page "butterfly ballot" listing of presidential candidates.

Another 10,310 were "under-votes," many of them ballots in which voters trying to dislodge the rectangular chad next to a candidate's name were only able to create a dimple.

Votomatics and their infamous dimpled chads drew much scorn in the election's aftermath, but other systems were more error-prone.

The rate of uncounted ballots was 6.5 percent in the 9 counties using a different type of punch system called Datavote. It was 6.3 percent in tiny Union County, the only jurisdiction that used paper ballots counted by hand. And in the 15 counties that used an older form of optical-scan voting, 5.6 percent of ballots went uncounted."

http://g2.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/news/optical_scan.html