Something's rotten in the state of Denmark

What exactly was Michael Barbian doing?

2004-12-20T09:00:00.001-08:00

From Wired News, who have been terrific in covering the recount/irregularity stories...

As a statewide election recount got underway in Ohio last week, a Democratic congressman called on the FBI to impound vote-tabulating computers in at least one county and investigate suspicions of election tampering in the state.

Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan), ranking Democrat of the House Judiciary Committee, sought the investigation after an Ohio election official disclosed in an affidavit (.pdf) that an employee of Triad Governmental Systems, the company that wrote voting software used with punch-card machines in 41 of Ohio's 88 counties, dismantled Hocking County's tabulation computer days before the recount and "put a patch on it."

Conyers called the action "inappropriate and likely illegal election tampering." A spokesman for the Green Party, one of the parties requesting the recount, called it "compelling evidence" of deliberate tampering. A public hearing in Ohio on Monday will determine if there is cause for an investigation.

But Sherole Eaton, a Democrat and the deputy director of elections for Hocking County who wrote the affidavit, said her words have been blown out of proportion. She doesn't think Triad tampered with the votes and is a little angry that the Green Party and others have spun her words to imply that they did.

Eaton's story came to light only when members of the Green Party contacted her before the recount to discuss the procedures and asked who had access to the counting software. When Eaton mentioned Triad's recent visit, the Green Party took the information to Conyers and presented it at an ad hoc Judicial Committee hearing in Ohio as evidence of possible vote tampering.

Eaton said that after the Green Party started spreading the information around, she decided to write the affidavit to get her account on record so that it would not be distorted or misinterpreted.

Doug Jones, Iowa's chief examiner of voting equipment and a computer scientist at the University of Iowa who has been a leading critic of electronic voting machines, said the matter was less likely a case of election tampering than poor election procedures and oversight. But he added that even if no one tampered with votes, the fact that someone had unsupervised access to tabulating equipment before the recount was a breach of security procedures and might even violate Ohio election law.

"The tabulating room should be viewed as a secure computer systems site where nobody goes in there unsupervised, but the affidavit suggests there was no supervision in the tabulating room," Jones said. He said that suspicions of tampering are just as destructive to the integrity of an election as actual tampering and laws prohibiting unsupervised access to voting equipment should be enforced.

According to Eaton's affidavit, Michael Barbian, a technician for Triad, called Eaton on Dec. 10 to say he'd be coming to the office to "check out" the elections computer before the recount Dec. 14. When he arrived to examine the machine, a 14-year-old Dell PC, the computer wouldn't boot up. Barbian told Eaton the computer's internal battery was dead and that "stored information" on it was "gone."

Barbian told Eaton he "could put a patch on" the computer and "proceeded to take the computer apart and call his office to get information" to put into the computer. When the computer was fixed, Barbian asked Eaton which precinct the county planned to hand-count, then returned to the tabulating room. When he came out again, he said the computer was ready and told them to reboot it once to reset the internal clock, then leave it on so the battery could recharge.

Voting activists have seized the detail about the "patch" and the precinct as proof that Barbian rigged the machine. Under Ohio's recount law, a county must first hand-count 3 percent of ballots and then run them through a machine count. If the hand tally matches the machine tally, the county can recount the remaining ballots by machine only. But if the hand and machine counts differ, the county must hand-count all ballots.

So activists say Barbian asked about the precinct so he could set the machine to record only those ballots correctly, while tampering with votes in other precincts.

Hocking completed its recount Wednesday, and the results differed from the certified results by only three votes. President Bush and Sen. John Kerry picked up an additional vote each when pregnant chads fell out of two ballots that had previously shown no vote in the presidential race. A second extra vote went to Kerry from a previously uncounted absentee ballot. Bush won Hocking County with 6,935 votes to John Kerry's 6,173.

In the end, the county hand-counted a different precinct from the one Eaton told Barbian it would count. The county changed the precinct after members of the Green Party expressed concern that Barbian knew which precinct was planned. The results of that precinct matched the original certified results.

Brett Rapp, president of Triad, said Barbian visited the Hocking County elections office before the recount because the state had mandated that only the presidential race would be recounted and Barbian had to set up the computer to count and report only that race on punch cards.

What exactly was Michael Barbian doing?

2004-12-20T09:00:00.000-08:00

From Wired News, who have been terrific in covering the recount/irregularity stories...

As a statewide election recount got underway in Ohio last week, a Democratic congressman called on the FBI to impound vote-tabulating computers in at least one county and investigate suspicions of election tampering in the state.

Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan), ranking Democrat of the House Judiciary Committee, sought the investigation after an Ohio election official disclosed in an affidavit (.pdf) that an employee of Triad Governmental Systems, the company that wrote voting software used with punch-card machines in 41 of Ohio's 88 counties, dismantled Hocking County's tabulation computer days before the recount and "put a patch on it."

Conyers called the action "inappropriate and likely illegal election tampering." A spokesman for the Green Party, one of the parties requesting the recount, called it "compelling evidence" of deliberate tampering. A public hearing in Ohio on Monday will determine if there is cause for an investigation.

But Sherole Eaton, a Democrat and the deputy director of elections for Hocking County who wrote the affidavit, said her words have been blown out of proportion. She doesn't think Triad tampered with the votes and is a little angry that the Green Party and others have spun her words to imply that they did.

Eaton's story came to light only when members of the Green Party contacted her before the recount to discuss the procedures and asked who had access to the counting software. When Eaton mentioned Triad's recent visit, the Green Party took the information to Conyers and presented it at an ad hoc Judicial Committee hearing in Ohio as evidence of possible vote tampering.

Eaton said that after the Green Party started spreading the information around, she decided to write the affidavit to get her account on record so that it would not be distorted or misinterpreted.

Doug Jones, Iowa's chief examiner of voting equipment and a computer scientist at the University of Iowa who has been a leading critic of electronic voting machines, said the matter was less likely a case of election tampering than poor election procedures and oversight. But he added that even if no one tampered with votes, the fact that someone had unsupervised access to tabulating equipment before the recount was a breach of security procedures and might even violate Ohio election law.

"The tabulating room should be viewed as a secure computer systems site where nobody goes in there unsupervised, but the affidavit suggests there was no supervision in the tabulating room," Jones said. He said that suspicions of tampering are just as destructive to the integrity of an election as actual tampering and laws prohibiting unsupervised access to voting equipment should be enforced.

According to Eaton's affidavit, Michael Barbian, a technician for Triad, called Eaton on Dec. 10 to say he'd be coming to the office to "check out" the elections computer before the recount Dec. 14. When he arrived to examine the machine, a 14-year-old Dell PC, the computer wouldn't boot up. Barbian told Eaton the computer's internal battery was dead and that "stored information" on it was "gone."

Barbian told Eaton he "could put a patch on" the computer and "proceeded to take the computer apart and call his office to get information" to put into the computer. When the computer was fixed, Barbian asked Eaton which precinct the county planned to hand-count, then returned to the tabulating room. When he came out again, he said the computer was ready and told them to reboot it once to reset the internal clock, then leave it on so the battery could recharge.

Voting activists have seized the detail about the "patch" and the precinct as proof that Barbian rigged the machine. Under Ohio's recount law, a county must first hand-count 3 percent of ballots and then run them through a machine count. If the hand tally matches the machine tally, the county can recount the remaining ballots by machine only. But if the hand and machine counts differ, the county must hand-count all ballots.

So activists say Barbian asked about the precinct so he could set the machine to record only those ballots correctly, while tampering with votes in other precincts.

Hocking completed its recount Wednesday, and the results differed from the certified results by only three votes. President Bush and Sen. John Kerry picked up an additional vote each when pregnant chads fell out of two ballots that had previously shown no vote in the presidential race. A second extra vote went to Kerry from a previously uncounted absentee ballot. Bush won Hocking County with 6,935 votes to John Kerry's 6,173.

In the end, the county hand-counted a different precinct from the one Eaton told Barbian it would count. The county changed the precinct after members of the Green Party expressed concern that Barbian knew which precinct was planned. The results of that precinct matched the original certified results.

Brett Rapp, president of Triad, said Barbian visited the Hocking County elections office before the recount because the state had mandated that only the presidential race would be recounted and Barbian had to set up the computer to count and report only that race on punch cards.

Triad up to no good

2004-12-15T11:22:00.000-08:00

This was sent to us:

The minority leader for the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers had a Monday hearing in Columbus Ohio on the Ohio voting irregularities which turned "explosive". Hocking County deputy director of elections, Sherole Eaton, states in her affidavit that a representative of Triad Governmental Systems, the Ohio firm that created and maintains the vote-counting software in dozens of Ohio counties, made several adjustments to the Hocking County tabulator last Friday, in advance of the state's recount, which is taking place this week. (Conyers is now asking FBI and County prosecutor to investigate.) Programmer Clint Curtis testified that he designed a program to hack the vote in Florida for Congressman Feeney. There was also evidence of major Republican vote suppression of urban, Democrat areas.

In a related development, Kerry lawyer, McTigue has unexpectedly sent Ohio counties a request for 11 ways to conduct the recount in Ohio that would increase transparancy and help ensure every vote is counted. However, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC-- the only mainstream commentator who has been taking the allegations of vote fraud in Ohio and elsewhere seriously--said that if Kerry really meant business he would have his own investigation and be more vocal. Furthermore, in another article several county officials claimed they did not have the money for Kerry's requests or were otherwise non-committal.

Washington Post on Ohio's "Lost" Votes

2004-12-15T11:13:00.000-08:00

"Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio," goes the headline in today's WaPo.

Electoral problems prevented many thousands of Ohioans from voting on Nov. 2. In Columbus, bipartisan estimates say that 5,000 to 15,000 frustrated voters turned away without casting ballots. It is unlikely that such "lost" voters would have changed the election result -- Ohio tipped to President Bush by a 118,000-vote margin and cemented his electoral college majority.

But similar problems occurred across the state and fueled protest marches and demands for a recount. The foul-ups appeared particularly acute in Democratic-leaning districts, according to interviews with voters, poll workers, election observers and election board and party officials, as well as an examination of precinct voting patterns in several cities.

In Cleveland, poorly trained poll workers apparently gave faulty instructions to voters that led to the disqualification of thousands of provisional ballots and misdirected several hundred votes to third-party candidates. In Youngstown, 25 electronic machines transferred an unknown number of votes for Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) to the Bush column.

In Columbus, Cincinnati and Toledo, and on college campuses, election officials allocated far too few voting machines to busy precincts, with the result that voters stood on line as long as 10 hours -- many leaving without voting. Some longtime voters discovered their registrations had been purged.

This article was appearing on December 15, a month and a half after the election. You want to tell me why this same article could not have been printed a month ago?

HOLY FUCKING SHIT; or, Clint Curtis testifies

2004-12-14T13:12:00.000-08:00

Clint Curtis, the programmer in Florida who claims he was asked to design software that could alter the votes of touchscreen voting machines, has given testimony to the Judiciary Committee Democrats -- Nadler, Conyers, et al -- under oath.

Here's a transcript. Thanks to Bradblog and Mark Crispin Miller's listserv for sending this out way.

Q: [Congressman Nadler] And did he ever express why he wanted a code to rig an election?

A: No. I immediately assumed that they were trying to keep you guys from cheating with it... so... [laughter] so... I wrote up the documentation of what you would look for in the source code. How you would make sure the you - CUT - Mrs. Yang, and said, here's your report. Here's your program. And she said, you don't understand, we need to hide the fraud in the source. In the source code.

Q: Hide the fraud, not reveal the fraud?

A: Not reveal the fraud because they needed to control the vote in South Florida, is what she said.

Q: That's what she said?

A: That's what she said.

Q: To your knowledge, to your knowledge, was this used?

A: I have no idea. I was ready to leave, so... (laughter) and and I was tired and left the company.

Q: In your testimony a minute ago I think you said just before you left in answer to Congresswoman Tubbs Jones question, that... would you just repeat what you said in terms of uh the the uh exit polls?

A: The exit polls should not be significantly different from the vote.

Q: And if they were you would conclude what?

A: I would conclude someone's playing with the vote?

Q: Not with the exit polls?

A: That's possible too.

Q: OK and that's why...

A: Something is definitely skewed.

Q: Something is skewed with one of the other above.

A: To select which one you'd have to see where the problem is.

Q: Let me ask you one further question. Assuming for the moment that such software, [UNINTELLIGABLE] such software to rig a vote was used, in one or more machines in Ohio or in Florida, couldn't you today detect that if you looked at the source code?

A: If you could get the machines and they had not been patched yet. I mean, once they get in and touch em', anything could happen. You could also set timers to do that, but then you could see the timer. Then you'd have to take those machines, decompile them, which I couldn't do, but possibly a Microsoft, an MIT something could do, you might... you might be able to.

Q: You might?

A: Depends on how good they are at destroying what they had.

Q: Destroying what they had by tampering the machine afterwards, or by programming them to destroy instructions in the first place?

A: Right. Because then since you...

Q: Either or both?

A: Either or both. You didn't actually seen what's in there, so you don't know if the code is running as a single executable or running in various modules. If it's running in modules you could make the code actually eat itself.

Q: Let me ask you one further question. We've.... I've heard that people who assume that lots of the election results, that a large fraction of the election result within the state may have been effected by deliberate fraud in a computer, are paranoid, because in order to do that you would have to have access to thousands of machines and that would be readily detectable. To what extent is that true?

A: In depends on the technology that used. If you use a central tabulation machine that fed in, all you'd have to do is set a flag. You set a flag; the central tabulation machine would flip your vote.

Q: So if you. So one person putting in bad code in a central tabulation machine could affect thousands and thousands or tens of thousands of votes?

A: Right.

Q: And...

A: And you could activate either automatically, or you could make is so that there's code existing on like an otonic (?) machine which feeds it, where you would punch it in, it would see the flag, the server would see the flag and then...

Q: And if you had a recount and no paper trail, would that be, as soon as that had happened, would that be reversible by seeing the discrepancy between the tabulator, the central tabulator code, and what the individual machines which had not been tampered with code?

A:Not if I wrote it.

Q: Why not? In other words...

A: In other words I could make it match.

Q: You could work back from the tabulator to the individual machines, so that the tabulator could tell the machines to switch their results?

A: Yes. It talks both ways. You could flip it to whatever you need.

Q: And they actually do talk to each other. this the machines and the tabulator?

A: As long as it's hooked up. As long as they are networked together, they can talk to each other.

Q: So in other words, there is absolutely no assurance whatsoever on anything with regards to these machines.

A: Absolutely none, unless you look at the source code and make sure it's safe before it goes in.

Q: Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]

Chair: Thank you Congressman Nadler. I know that Congresswoman Waters has questions, then Senator Miller, and then Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones.

Q: [Congresswoman Waters] This will only take a moment, if you would come back to the ...

A: I'm new at this.

Q: As you know, there has been a lot of discussion about that, I think it is Diebold Company. Their relationship to the President and a group within the administration and supposedly comments about helping to insure that the President is reelected. In your world in your environment, have you heard any of these kind of discussion? Do you know people from Diebold... do you have any sense of any actions that may have been taken?

A: I don't know anything about that at all.

Q: Thank You

A: Sorry.

Chair: Senator Miller

Q: [Senator Miller] Thank you Madam Chair.

Chair: Sir.

Q: I suspect that people will attack you in terms of your credibility. Could you restate once again for the record your credentials?

A: I'm a programmer. I worked for NASA. I've worked for Exxon/Mobile. Worked for the Department of Transportation. And, other elements of my story, because this company... well let's get into it, why not? [LAUGHTER] This company also, they have a NASA contract. and they were basically downloading tons of information, I mean gigabytes worth, and handing it off to this little Chinese guy named Henry Ng [Lee or Nee?] and it didn't seem right and he was packing things and I wrote a program for DOT that allowed contractors to send their information into DOT and he was kind of the quality assurance guy for software. He put a wiretapping module in the program that went to the contractors so that it actually sent everything they sent back to Yang. So I reported all this and just last March, I think, he was arrested for attempting to send anti-tank missile chips to the capitol of Communist China. If that's correct, this is such a small thing. [LAUGHTER] Although I think that he only got a hundred dollar fine and no time.

Chair: Thank You.

Update: From that same Miller listserv, here was a response to the Curtis testimony. (Because I haven't gotten his permission, I'm not crediting with who it came from. But I think he makes good points, necessary to think about in weighing the Curtis testimony.):

Curtis indirectly contradicts himself by at first saying that the code could eat itself, either on command or by timers. If one were to think like a conspirator for a moment, you would force this code to "eat itself" as soon as the election was over to cover your tracks in case the machine is inspected. Then, Curtis says he could recreate the votes and make them match the tabulator computers going back into the voting machines. If the code has eaten itself, there is no way that this would work and there would be a variance in the votes.

All of his testimony is pure conjecture as he does not know for sure if his software or any other software was actually ever used. As I have said before, he uses the answer "I don't know" or "I have no idea" too much.

Also, being a programmer, if you decompile an executable, you will get machine language code. This is the language the CPU understands the easiest and is very easy to follow. If you follow the code and it makes a branch or jump command to a routine that is not there or immediately returns back to the main code, you could assume that something is wrong. You usually do not write routines that return immediately and leave it in production code. I have written C programs that had code that I used to test with that calls another routine. I comment this out when I am finished or delete it completely and it is not compiled into the executable generally. There are some compiler options that would retain comments, but that increases the final size of the code.

...His testimony is purely speculative and there was nothing jaw dropping about it except for naming Feeney publicly.....

More... Much more to talk about

2004-12-13T18:38:00.000-08:00

Just read the recent postings on Keith's blog. I'll post later on tonight or tomorrow. Sorry for the delays -- and there are emails to answer, as well. I've been submerged. I'm now up for air again. Feels good.

Is the Ohio recount effort being obstructed?

2004-12-13T18:29:00.000-08:00

John Conyers seems to think so.

Here's a press release from the Common Dreams progressive newswire.

WASHINGTON -- December 12 -- Yesterday, it came to the attention of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff that efforts to audit poll records in Greene County, Ohio are being obstructed by County Election officials and/or Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell. According to Joan Quinn and Eve Robertson, two election observers researching voting records, Greene County officials initially gave Quinn and Robertson access to poll records, and then abruptly withdrew such access. Greene County Director of Elections Carole Garman claimed that she had withdrawn access to the voting records at the direction of Secretary Blackwell. Regardless of who ordered the denial of this access, such an action appears to violate Ohio law. Later, at the same office, election observers found the office unlocked, and what appeared to be locked ballot boxes, unattended. Prior to the withdrawal of access to the books, observers had found discrepancies in election records, and possible evidence of minority vote suppression.

House Judiciary Committee Democrats wrote a letter to Blackwell on December 2 requesting answers to 34 questions about election irregularities and fraud in Ohio. This letter included questions about major discrepancies in Perry County poll books. Since that letter, additional documentation has been provided to the Democratic staff demonstrating similar problems in other counties.

Because of the urgency of the Greene County matter, Congressman John Conyers, Jr., Ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, has requested that Ms. Quinn testify at a hearing scheduled Monday in Columbus, Ohio. Ms. Quinn has agreed to do so and will also present sworn statements from corroborating witnesses. Conyers issued the following statement:

"The Recount effort is simply a search for the truth of what happened during the 2004 Presidential election in Ohio. We have now repeatedly seen election officials obstruct and stonewall this search for the truth. I am beginning to wonder what it is they are trying to hide."

ESS and Diebold

2004-12-13T18:25:00.000-08:00

are owned by... brothers?

Hout doubted

2004-12-13T18:18:00.000-08:00

Here's another WIred News piece on the attempted Debunking on the Hout study by McCullough et al. Problem: when someone claims that one argument against the Hout study is that "only two fo the 15 counties using touch-screen machines in Florida exhibited anomalous results" -- well, then what exactly happened in Broward and Palm Beach?

The explanation in the Wired piece: "There was something unusual that went on in two counties, but there are many other things that could give rise to this anomaly," [MIT Poli Sci professor Charles] Stewart said. "Most of them are things that we're pretty sure affected this presidential election -- such as get-out-the-vote efforts by Republicans and special efforts at mobilizing Jewish voters over the issue of Israel and terrorism."

Does that explain it enough to you, as to why the GOTV efforts would work any better in Broward and Palm Beach than in other Florida counties? It sure doesn't to me!

Cliff

2004-12-13T18:14:00.000-08:00

Okay, okay, we have been asleep at the wheel -- or rather, have had to do the work that pays the bills. But there's a lot to catch up on.

First, here's the Cliff Curtis situation. Curtis claims that Rep. Tom Feeney of Florida asked him four years ago for software that could atler votes on electronic voting machines in Florida.

urtis said Feeney asked for code that could go undetected on a voting machine and be easily triggered without any devices by anyone using the machine. Curtis had never seen source code for a voting machine, but in five hours, he said he designed code in Visual Basic that would launch if someone touched specific spots on the voting screen after selecting a candidate.

Once the code was activated, it would search the machine to see if the selected candidate's total was behind. If it was, the machine would award that candidate 51 percent of the total votes recorded on the machine and redistribute the remaining votes among the other candidates in the race.

Curtis said he initially believed Feeney wanted the code to see if such fraud were possible and to know how to detect it. The programmer told Feeney that such code could never be undetectable in source code, and he wrote a paper describing how to look for it. But when he gave the paper and code to his employer, Yang told him he was looking at it all wrong. They weren't looking at how to find code, Curtis said she told him. They needed code that couldn't be found.

"Her words were that it was needed to control the vote in West Palm Beach, Florida," Curtis said. "Once she said, 'We need to steal an election,' that put me back. I made it clear that I could not produce code that could do that and no one else should."

Even if the Curtis story turns out to be bogus -- the most alarming thing to take away from it is that even if this software was not used -- it could have been used. We refer back to our theory professed in some post from far long ago: in a nation with the top technological know-how and software companies in all the world, how can our electoral process be so suspectible to tampering?

39 voting machines were left unused in Franklin County

2004-12-12T09:16:00.000-08:00

Franklin County -- yes, the same county that had a glitch that gave Bush near 4,000 extra votes -- left 39 voting machines unused while people waited in long lines to vote.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - While some voters waited in long lines to cast a ballot, the Franklin County elections board left 39 voting machines unused on Election Day.

The unused equipment amounted to 1.4 percent of the county's 2,840 machines.

Twenty-two machines left in a warehouse as emergency replacements were never used on Election Day and 17 replacement machines were shipped but never activated at the polls, according to Elections Director Matthew Damschroder.

Damschroder said the day before the election, he ordered that all 99 reserve machines be sent to precincts where long lines were expected.

Damschroder said he learned the extent of the unused machines last the week. He said the new information meant that there were fewer unused machines than was thought, and he said no election results were affected.

Damschroder said the discrepancies occurred because information from the board's warehouse about the placement of machines wasn't communicated with his office staff when he prepared his postelection report.

Thomas Rosenberg, a lawyer who helped monitor the election for the Kerry-Edwards campaign in Franklin County, called the revelations "disturbing" but said it was too soon to jump to conclusions.

"We hope that it is nothing more than human beings made errors of judgment for which all we can do is take steps to make sure it doesn't happen again," he said.

Damschroder said technicians hired to repair and deliver machines on Election Day indicated they had tried to deliver all of the machines. In some cases, the polls were closed or workers said they weren't needed, Damschroder said.

Recounting Alaska

2004-12-09T08:58:00.000-08:00

It's happening: a recount of the Alaska Senate race.

Alaskans For Fair Elections is now seeking technical consultations with people familiar with
the AccuVote ballot and Diebold software. Contact: David Koester, swarming@mosquitonet.com, or Ed Davis, edavis@mosquitonet.com.

The Recount Alaska effort is citing exit poll discrepancies that predicted Tony Knowles would beat Lisa Murkowski -- he lost -- and speculation of Diebold craziness.

One thing that makes me skeptical of any problems in the state is that Alaska is always a firmly Republican state in Presidential races; I easily buy the idea that all the people coming in to vote for Bush brought Murkowski in on the coattails. Especially given that voters in Alaska were seeing Bush ads -- run on national cable -- and weren't seeing Kerry ads -- which were placed only on local television in swing states.

But, another recount funded!

Conyers on C-Span

2004-12-09T08:56:00.000-08:00

John Conyers, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee and one of the first three Congressmen to demand an investigation into irregularities by the GAO, hosted a forum yesterday on the 2004 election vote in Ohio and possible irregularities in the vote itself and the subsequent counting of ballots. You can view the forum, which was carried on C-Span, on the C-Span website.

David Corn on the irregularities

2004-12-07T13:07:00.000-08:00

The likable -- at least when I met him, and certainly one of the few people who looked good in Triumph the Insult Comic Dog at Spin Alley bit -- David Corn of the Nation casts a skeptical eye towards charges of voter fraud.

Corn: "In pieces for The Nation magazine, I've noted that there is good cause to worry about the integrity of a voting system that is overseen by partisan players and that relies in part upon paperless electronic voting machines that are manufactured by companies that are led by pro-GOP executives and that refuse to reveal the computer codes they use. But I've also cautioned against declaring that the potential for abuse means the system was abused to flip the results. Exit polls that differ from reported vote counts are not necessarily proof of foul play, and statistical analyses that seem to raise questions need thorough vetting before they are waved about as signs of chicanery."

Corn also takes issue with the Hout Berkeley study that suggested that something was rotten in Broward and Palm Beach counties. (Though, weirdly, he keeps referring the Hout study as a study by three graduate students -- which makes me worry that Corn got his Berkeley studies confused. No -- I've been corrected, there were three graduate students working with Hout on the project.)

Corn continues: "A strong case that the election was stolen--either in Ohio or Florida--still has yet to be made. Statistical arguments are not convincing without concrete evidence (or widespread support among statistical experts). When reporters looked at actual ballots in Florida they found the armchair analysts were way off in their assumptions. And a recount requested by Ralph Nader in a limited number of precincts in New Hampshire--after Bush received higher than expected vote tallies in those parts of the Granite State--found little change from the original results. KPFK, the Pacifica radio station in Los Angeles, was a bit ahead of the facts when it issued a statement on November 23 noting it was projecting that Kerry "has won the State of Ohio and thus the Presidency by a minimum electoral college count of 272 to 266."

Yet even the skeptical Corn does give credence to other concerns. "Yet the voting system is shaky enough to warrant serious concern. The General Accountability Office was right to agree to a request from Representative John Conyers and four other Democratic House members that it investigate election irregularities in the 2004 election. According to these members of Congress, the GAO will examine the security and accuracy of voting technologies, distribution and allocation of voting machines, and the counting of provisional ballots. ... There are Bush critics who probably never will accept the November 2 results. And the systemic problems that do exist--secretive voting technologies, the opportunity for partisan hacks to engage in voter suppression--will allow these people to hang on to their worst fears and to continue to share look-at-this! emails with fellow believers (or nonbelievers). But the evidence to date is that the election results were not rigged but were produced by a flawed system."

Recounts in Alaska?

2004-12-07T11:39:00.000-08:00

Believe it.

Kerry lost there by, um, a gajillion votes, but Tony Knowles lost to Lisa Murkowski in the Senate race by about 3 percent, or 9,400 votes. Knowles himself doesn't believe a recount would give him a win.

But Recount Alaska cites "exit polls on Election Day putting Knowles in the lead, so Murkowski's solid victory is curious. Second, the machines that optically scan most ballots cast in Alaska "have proven anomalous in Florida and were the basis for (Ralph) Nader calling for a recount in New Hampshire."

Except the New Hampshire recount turned up nothing. Alaska's Accuvote optical ballot scanners were, yes, built by Diebold.

They have $6,700 raised, and need to get to $10,000 by 5 pm tomorrow. (Wednesday.)

"Whatever It Takes": Ohio Update

2004-12-07T10:49:00.000-08:00

Catching up on the last few days of Ohio...

Green Party press release from yesterday: "Federal Judge Rules That Ohio Recount Will Go Forward in All Counties." "The judge also provisionally granted the motion by the Kerry-Edwards campaign to intervene in the lawsuit in defense of the position of Cobb and Libertarian Michael Badnarik. Although the judge did not agree with Cobb that the recount should proceed on an expedited basis, the Cobb campaign is confident that a full and complete recount will take place."

***

Juan Gonzalez in today's NY Daily News: "Ohio was the decisive state in the election and none of the challenges is expected to prevent the Electoral College from making the President's reelection official. But the hand recount may be able to tell why nearly 93,000 voters who went to the polls did not register any vote for President." The piece features a Democratic state senator saying that his touchscreen voting machine registered a vote for Bush: "I hate to be part of the conspiracy crowd, but it happened to me," said State Sen. Bob Hagan (D-Youngstown). Hagan said he then repeated his vote for Kerry, and this time his candidate's name lit up properly. (Note: I'd been under the impression that Ohio was all punch cards and optical scan ballots. But apparently there were touchscreen machines in use. Sorry for the confusion.)

Gonzalez: "Something tells me no bank in America would accept as many computer problems in tracking its money as Ohio's elections board had in tracking its votes on Nov. 2."

***

The Green Party formally submits their recount demand today, as well as their bonds to the 88 counties in Ohio. David Cobb and others will hold a press conference at 2:00 pm. Details here.

***

The NY Times: "As Questions Keep Coming, Ohio Certifies Its Vote Count." "The Ohio secretary of state officially certified on Monday that President Bush won that swing state by roughly 119,000 votes, but an array of Democrats, third-party candidates and independent groups continued to question the results, issuing new demands for a statewide recount and a formal investigation of the vote." Remember when any coverage just focused on crazy Internet rumors? As Triumph the Insult Comic Dog said, "Ah, those were the days."

"Even before Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican, issued the final tally, the Democratic National Committee said it would appoint an expert panel to review voting problems in Ohio - including long lines, voting machine errors and understaffed polling stations - that it said had disenfranchised voters in predominantly Democratic urban districts.

Democratic officials, walking a fine line between their angry liberal base and centrist voters who consider the election over, said they were not contesting the results. But they said they planned to use the results of their investigation, which is to be completed by the summer, to demand changes to the electoral systems in Ohio and other states."

***

Dec 6: "DNC Chair McAuliffe and Voting Rights Institute Chair Donna Brazile Announce Comprehensive Investigative Study on Election Practices in Ohio"

"The DNC investigative study will examine the legitimate questions and concerns that have been raised in Ohio and will develop factual information which will be critically important in crafting further necessary election reforms. Specifically, the investigation will seek to address questions surrounding the issues of adequate voting resources (machines, pollworkers, etc), the high number of provisional ballots – valid and invalid – as compared with other states, anomalies in the reported results as compared with exit polls, historical data, and reported anomalies within counties and precincts and whether the touch-screen machines and tabulating systems functioned properly.

To address these questions and more, the DNC, at its own expense, will assemble a top-flight team of recognized experts to be named at a later date including:

a political scientist expert in quantitative analysis;
an expert or experts in the design of computer hardware and software systems;
an expert in voting systems and machines;
an investigator with forensic expertise; and
a pollster to survey voters who cast provisional ballots and to conduct other original survey research as needed.

This team will be supported by DNC and state party staff, consultants who were deeply involved in the election effort in Ohio, Ohio attorneys and the DNC legal team."

The DNC's list of experts sounds like a wonky version of the Breakfast Club!.A nerd, a jock, a princess, and an investgiator with forensic expertise!

"You just bought yourself another Saturday, McAullife!"

Ohio is certifiable

2004-12-06T10:13:00.000-08:00

So according to this AP story in the New York Times website, two major challenges are expected to unfold today as Ohio Sec. of State Ken "Do you really have to identify him as Sec of State anymore" Blackwell certifies the state's final presidential election results.

Blackwell's declaration will have Bush be the winner at about 119,000 votes. The two challenges?

"Lawyers representing voters upset about problems at the polls plan to contest the results with the Ohio Supreme Court, citing documented cases of long lines, a shortage of machines and a pattern of problems in predominantly black neighborhoods.

In addition, third party candidates, bolstered by a favorable federal court ruling, plan to file requests for a recount in each of Ohio's 88 counties. About 400 people rallied at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus on Saturday to demand a recount begin immediately."

Read the rest of it.

BREAKING NEWS: Washington State Governor's Race Recount to Happen

2004-12-03T17:07:00.000-08:00

This just in: after two machine counts that brought the margin of victory for Republican Dino Rossi to 42 votes over Democrat Chrristine Gregoire, there's gonna be another count -- this time a hand recount -- in Washington State.

OLYMPIA - Washington Democrats, hoping the third time's the charm, will pay for yet another recount in the state's ultra-close governor's race that remains unsettled after more than a month.

The party also is heading to the state Supreme Court to seek a ruling that all ballots be treated the same from county to county. That would mean considering some previously uncounted ballots, particularly in Democratic-leaning King County.

Democrat Christine Gregoire, 57, best known for her successful battle with the tobacco industry as the state's three-term attorney general, trailed Republican Dino Rossi, 45, a former state Senate budget chairman, by just 42 votes after a machine recount was certified earlier this week.

Rossi won the initial vote count by 261 ballots, a margin so close it triggered the mandatory machine recount.

Republicans were outraged at the prospect of a third vote count and a legal battle.

"It sounds like they want to make Florida look like a tea party," complained Mary Lane, a Rossi spokeswoman. "It's outrageous, it's dangerous and it shows how little Christine Gregoire cares about the Democratic process. She will do virtually anything to try to win.

"We are not going to let this stand. We will not let her try to steal this election. Dino has won this election twice legitimately and Christine Gregoire is trying to overturn this election illegitimately."

State Democratic Chairman Paul Berendt said the party gave the secretary of state's office a cashier's check for $730,000 to order a recount of all 2.9 million votes cast for governor on Nov. 2 - not just votes in selected counties. A flood of online contributions this week allowed the party to pay for the hand count.

"We're going to count every vote in every county, whether it's a Rossi county or a Gregoire county," Berendt said in remarks prepared for a news conference with outgoing Gov. Gary Locke and former Gov. Booth Gardner, all Democrats.

Gregoire had told party leaders she was prepared to give up her quest for the governor's mansion if only a partial recount were ordered. "No games," she said Thursday.

The hand count is expected to cost the party over $1 million, including legal costs, and leaders said it was a backbreaking job to raise that kind of money in just a week.

Secretary of State Sam Reed is expected to order the new count on Monday and most counties are expected to begin the laborious job Wednesday. Reed said the count should be completed by Dec. 23 unless there are legal challenges.

I can't emphasize two things more strongly: one, how much more effective a hand recount is to a manual one, and two, how smart and right it was for Gregoire to push for a recount of all counties, and not just cherrypicked ones where she was more likely to find undercounted votes.

House Dems send a little letter to Mr. Blackwell

2004-12-03T14:56:00.000-08:00

Here's more on Conyers and 11 other House Dems -- presumably the ones who pushed for the GAO investigation -- contacting Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell.

The letter, which asks 34 questions of the chief state elections official and Bush Ohio campaign chair, seeks a thorough accounting of a “one-two punch that may well have altered and suppressed votes, particularly minority and Democratic voters.”

The letter is signed by twelve House Democrats, including the minority leader of the House Judiciary Committee John Conyers, Jr.

Among other things, the letter questions the terror alert lockdown in Warren County (the FBI says they know nothing about it; County officials said there was a level-10 threat they received a tip on from an FBI agent).

It also calls attention to Perry County, where voting tallies suggest some voters were allowed to cast more than one ballot, and to two additional precincts which had more votes for President than voters.

Other irregularities include a county where voters cast 5,000 more votes for an underfunded Democratic Supreme Court candidate that they did for the most well-funded Democratic presidential candidate in history, John Kerry; heavily African American counties which cast huge numbers of votes for third-party candidates (nearly 3000 percent more than they did in 2000); extraordinarily high “spoiled” ballot rates in some counties; and a county where voters complained that votes for Kerry registered as votes for Bush.

A second section deals with the shortages of voting machines in Democratic and minority counties versus the surplus of machines in wealthier, more Republican areas of the state.

Here's the pdf file of the letter to Blackwell. Enjoy!

Conyers contacting Blackwell; Kerry campaign joining recount effort official

2004-12-03T11:08:00.000-08:00

Here's yesterday's Associated Press story by John McCarthy on the Kerry campaign joining the recount effort in Ohio.

Money quote: "The Kerry-Edwards campaign felt it had to intervene," said Daniel Hoffheimer, a Cincinnati lawyer who represents the campaign in Ohio. "We did not want a recount to go forward if it only was 87 (of Ohio's 88) counties."

Second money quote: "The Kerry campaign isn't disputing the outcome of President Bush's Nov. 2 victory in Ohio -- a 136,000-vote margin, based on unofficial results -- but wants to make sure any recount is "done accurately and completely," Hoffheimer said."

But here's other big news:

In another development, Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., sent a letter to Blackwell asking for his assistance in a House Judiciary Committee Democratic staff investigation of "election irregularities." That probe would be in addition to one sought by the Government Accountability Office.

Newshour covers the fraud brigade

2004-12-03T08:07:00.000-08:00

Remember when none of it was getting coverage. Or that the only coverage was dismissing any talk of irregularities as internet rumors and innuendos?

Yeah, I don't miss those days.

Jim Lehrer and company did 15-20 minutes last night on the voter irregularities -- beginning with a montage and then having a guest on from Electionline.org. If you have real player, you can check it out here.

(Thanks to Jorgey for the tip.)

"Help douse the fire that is raging"

2004-12-02T22:50:00.000-08:00

"Unfortunately, every development in Ohio is now subject to incredible claims and speculation. And why not? Before an election recount petition can actually begin, Ohio must first "certify" its results. Now, 4 weeks after the election, (and just 2 weeks before Ohio's 20 electoral votes are sent to Congress) the Ohio certification is still dragging on at a snail's pace. Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell seems unconcerned. Did I mention that Kenneth Blackwell was the chairman in Ohio for the Bush-Cheney campaign? Did you know that based on his timeline for the certification period, recount filing date, and then the recount itself... Ohio will have exactly one day to examine and recount 6 million votes before Ohio's electoral slate is formally sent to Congress? And yet my colleagues and I sometimes wonder why the "conspiracy theorists" on the net are going nuts.

The fact is, a lot of people over the last month have blown opportunities to tamp down the internet wildfire and restore some confidence in the outcome of the 2004 election. The exit polling organization (that received $10 million from the networks, by the way) should have come out weeks ago and explained why their exit polls were inaccurate? I accept the group's quiet explanations that their workers, in some states, were improperly trained and that the mathematical models analysts relied upon throughout the day were problematic. But the consortium should should swallow their pride, hold a full blown press conference, and help douse the fire that is raging. And Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell would help himself and the nation by speeding up Ohio's election certification so the recount can start immediately. The way to get even with those recount petitioners is to prove their allegations baseless and do it well before Ohio's electors are sent to Congress."

Some crazed conspiracy theorist? Some fringe journalist?

Nope. David Shuster, MSNBC News.

Florida election reforms...

2004-12-02T22:44:00.000-08:00

are at least a step in the right direction. Extending voting over 11 days sounds like a smart idea to me. A good way to alleviate the lines. (And a little harder on Republican suppress-the-vote dirty tricks!) Too bad they couldn't have passed such reform last year.

Two things...

2004-12-02T16:58:00.000-08:00

...people have been emailing us about.

First, the Keith Olbermann/Bev Harris disagreement. Keith writes in his blog that he's been greatly troubled by the self-promotional ways of Bev Harris, founder of BlackBoxVoting.org and a major proponent of examining the Florida irregularities. While we think that Bev Harris has done an excellent job of exposing how easily the Diebold tabulation systems for optican scan ballots could be hacked -- not that they were, but that they so easily could have been -- we also have found that a lot of her tactics and information don't always put corroboration first. Still, she has contributed in amassing much information about the flaws and faults of the voting technologies created by ESS, Sequoia, and Diebold.

Second, many readers have emailed us about the response to the Berkeley paper by Michael Hout, prepared by a Professor B.D. McCullough of Drexel University and Florenz Plassman of SUNY Binghamton. Our initial glances have found that McCullough and Plassman do not succeed in creating substantial doubts about Hout -- at one point, they claim that Hout did not subject his paper to peer review, only, in several stories I read, it was described that Hout and his partners did get peer notes and comments. That said, we'll take some time tonight to review the McCullough and Plassman paper. But we maintain, as Kevin Drum did on his blog for the Washington Monthly, that it's clear that something needs to be explained in Broward and Palm Beach, the two counties which Hout's paper seems to suggest were the true sites of irregularities that have not been explained... and are still not explained in McCullough and Plassmann's paper. (And for those who would suggest we don't like the McCullough paper just because we don't like the results, we remind you that we took a similarly sketpical eye towards a paper sympathetic to the charge of fraud that came from a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.) More on this soon; thanks for your patience.

RD

Is it me or is Chris Gregoire pretty good lookin'? Oh, come on, it's not sexist if the media tells us that John Thune is attractive, too

2004-12-02T16:47:00.000-08:00

Democrats have until 5 p.m. Friday to get the necessary funds to pay for a hand recount for the Washington governor's race, where 42 votes, after one machine recount, separate Chris Gregoire from Dino Rossi. John Kerry has helped those pushing for a recount get closer to that goal by donating $250,000 of unused funds (why those funds were unused, we can discuss sometime next April) to Gregoire for the recount effort. As we've mentioned before, there's a big difference in accuracy between a hand recount and a machine recount -- the fact is, machine recounts seem kinda absurd to us, since don't the machines then just not read or ignore many of the same ballots they did not read or ignore the first time around?

Yeah.

Anyway, go to Chris Gregoire's website.

First off, "Chris Gregoire's Transition team is now accepting applications." Good for her.

Second of all, to Gregoire's great credit, she explains why she's pushing for hand recounts across the state, and not just cherry-picking specific counties that are more likely to help her close that 42 vote gap. One of the biggest mistakes Al Gore made in 2000 was pushing for specific counties, rather than a statewide recount. The GOP might complain that Gregoire's statewide recount will cost more money and create more problems, but you better believe that if she were pushing for the less expensive particular counties recounts, that same GOP would be accusing her of cherry-picking.

Here is what she writes:

"I know it would be cheaper for the Party to do a limited hand count. And I know it would be possible to just count a few counties and put me in the lead.

"That doesn't work for the voters of our state. From the beginning this has been about getting all the votes counted so we can know for sure who won the governor's race.

"So, my request of the state Democratic Party is simple: count the entire state, or don't count at all. Counting every vote is the only right thing to do.

"Right now, the Governor-Elect's office sits empty in Olympia. The only way to fill it will be to have a statewide hand recount.

"In the meantime, both Senator Rossi and I are working on our transition and assembling an administration. Once the race is over, the winner will be able to take office with confidence. It may take a little while longer, but it's worth a few weeks to have four years of legitimacy."

Just out of curiosity, if a Washington state reader would mind emailing me, I'm curious -- Washington State is a state Kerry won pretty heavily. Gregoire was the state's popular Attorney General. Why was this race so close?

Emailing RottenDenmark

2004-12-02T15:16:00.000-08:00

A reminder. I've written how to email RottenDenmark to the right here, under the little explanation paragraph of what this site is. I just had to write the email address in a strange way, due to a desire to escape Spam Robots. Please use that email address for all correspondence. Thankee.

Olbermann: "Ohio really, really messed up."

2004-12-02T15:12:00.000-08:00

The Online Journalism Review has a great interview with Keith Olbermann on their website.

Here's the relevant material:

OJR: What first got you interested in voting irregularities, and why do you think you're the only mainstream news guy up on this?

KO: Ironically enough it was a piece in a newspaper, The Cincinnati Enquirer. MSM [mainstream media] in the heartland. It was the story of the still unexplained "lockdown" of the vote-counting in Warren County, Ohio. That just struck me as a terrific, very strange story. That was my doorway to a lot of terrific, very strange stories.

The MSM is beginning to get on board, as I suggested they might, as the Ohio recount becomes a reality. Chip Reid, a friend of mine who reports for NBC, went from doing a piece for Nightly News dismissing everything to just recently doing a piece on the Ohio recount, the reports of the flaky computer voting, etc. There was a Bev Harris sound bite in an Aaron Brown package on CNN the other night. They've only put a toe in the water, but they may yet dive in.

Relative to my being first, I think it's largely because I'm not a full-time political guy and not a partisan. The MSM political reporters are: 1) outcome-driven (when Kerry conceded, they checked out, largely because of exhaustion), and 2) driven by what the parties say about one another (Kerry concedes, Democrats stay in the background, Republicans say nothing -- so in their minds, where's the story?). My thought is that there are three components in the two-party system: Republicans, Democrats, and Voters.

Also I think TV has been reluctant because as an industry, we can soft-soap it all we want, but we did use those "early wave" exit polls to shape the tone of the early hours of election night coverage. We took so much grief in 2000, I think there's a natural reticence to publicize the fact that something might have gone wrong this time, too, especially when few of our critics in the newspapers are bringing it up themselves. There's a lot of passivity going around.

OJR: In your gut feeling, what do you think all the irregularities and recounts in Ohio and Florida will show, in the end?

KO: I can guarantee that they'll show that this Rube Goldbergian system of different voting laws, voting equipment, voting auditing we have in this country can't be taken for granted any more and must be standardized nationally, or we face a real threat to the democracy. As John Zogby said on the show the other night, yeah, it's great that 80% of the public thinks the election was absolutely legitimate. But, my God, that means one in five don't. That's an incredibly dangerous truth. We have to fix that.

Practically speaking, I suspect that the Ohio recount and whatever happens in Florida will not alter the outcome -- although I don't think that's the billion-to-one shot people assume. I'd say it's closer to 8:1. Ohio really, really messed up. And I think we'll see a lot of proved computerized disasters, and a lot of inappropriate partisanship.

OJR: How would you describe yourself politically on the liberal-to-conservative spectrum? How important do you think it is for MSM to be transparent on their political affiliations?

KO: I'm not political. I don't vote -- I don't believe journalists covering politics should (and I don't think the democracy would suffer if however many of us there are, recused ourselves). I have no more interest in the political outcome of an election than I did in the winner or loser of any ballgame I ever covered. I think transparency is vital; I think it's also, in these super-heated political times, unintentionally inescapable. If a reporter's work in turn winds up criticizing a candidate or party in some cases, and praising that same candidate or party in others, he's as close to neutral as he can be. If not, he's a partisan. The partisans outnumber the neutrals 1000:1.

It's a great interview, especially for anyone interested also interested in the topic of how blogging is changing how mainstream media covers the news.

(Thanks to Derelection for the tip.)

BREAKING NEWS: Provisional count done, Kerry +17,977; Total Ohio Bush margin +118, 506

2004-12-02T07:34:00.000-08:00

The results are in, and done, with the Ohio provisional ballots.

Current "additional" vote count:
Bush +61,505
Kerry +79,482

Difference: Kerry+17,977

As of November 20, the vote totals were:

11477 of 11477 precincts - 100 percent

George W. Bush (i) 2,796,147 - 51 percent

John F. Kerry 2,659,664 - 49 percent

for a margin on November 20 of 136,483.

Update: Oops. We originally thought that the glitch of 3,893 votes due to a faulty machine in Franklin County had not been factored in yet to these totals. But according to that Ohio Voter Suppression site, the 3,893 votes were factored into the totals for the provisional ballots for Franklin County.

Now factor in Kerry's margin in the provisionals, and now the difference between Kerry and Bush, for all those who were betting the over/under, is 118,506 votes. (The estimated number of ballots that did not register any vote for President, due to error or otherwise, in Ohio was 93,000.)

And with all the provisionals added and amended,

2,853,759 Bush
2,735,253 Kerry

(I unfortunately don't have the information for votes that the provisional ballots gave the third party candidates... and from what we're seeing in Cleveland, some of those numbers might be a little off, anyway.) I'd guess that about 30,000 or so people voted for a third party candidate, but we'll get those numbers soon.

But out of those people who cast a vote for either Bush or Kerry, 5,589,012, Bush received .5106 percent -- almost exactly 51% of those ballots. Meaning Kerry won .4894 -- almost exactly 49%.

I won't lie to you. 118,506 is a big number. But so was 4,000 from one little precinct, the extra votes a machine tacked on to Bush. And when a vote meant for Kerry went to Bush -- well, cut that margin down by two votes. But in all seriousness, the chances of Kerry pulling off Ohio are mathematically slim, slim, slim at best.

But that's not what this is about.

This is about the vote, the sanctity of our franchise, and the very real threats that exist to our confidence in it. If anything, this week's events in the Ukraine should remind us to take our elections and their results and the validation of those results incredibly seriously. I believe some things are worth the cost of a few hundred thousand dollars. The sanctity of our elections being one of them.

A hand recount will now determine how many of the 93,000 "undervotes" actually showed a clear sign indicating preference of a Presidential candidate -- in Florida 2000, about 7% of the undervote were determined to show indication, but in other recounts, it's grown to 20%. Let every vote be counted.

A hand recount will also determine whether there were any other tabulation glitches like that in Franklin County, and also help to shed light on whether there was anything off with the Warren County lockdown.

A hand recount might explain what in God's name happened in these Cleveland precincts.

And more than anything, a hand recount will give a country where in 2004 20% of voters think the President was not elected legitimately -- not 2000, folks, 2004 -- much-needed faith in the security and sanctity of our voting system.

Let the manual recounts begin!

Globe on Election irregularities nationwide

2004-12-02T07:24:00.000-08:00

Anyone who suggests that this was an error-free election and that there shouldn't be any concerns about the technologies used in our voting apparatus would do well to read this Boston Globe survey of nationwide voting errors.

The rest of you should read it, too, just to make you feel good and warm and... strangely titillated about being skeptical.

Kerry's provisional margin: 16,875 with 84 of 88 reporting

2004-12-02T07:19:00.000-08:00

Ohio provisional count, 84 of 88 counties reporting.

Bush +57,203
Kerry +74,078

Margin of difference + 16,875

Feds step in...

2004-12-02T07:13:00.000-08:00

As this Plain Dealer article says -- and by the way, Plain Dealer ranks just below Times-Picayune as the most awesome newspaper name of all time -- after Summit County found that 4,301 of the 5,966 provisional ballots were, to their standards, valid, in a county where Kerry ended up winning 57% of the votes to Bush's 43%, the FBI is sweeping on in.

Why? Because election officials are continuing to investigate instances where as many as 20 people may have voted twice in the Nov. 2 election.

"Summit County Sheriff Drew Alexander and election officials said in separate interviews that the FBI and the U.S. attorney's office in Cleveland have joined the sheriff's probe into hundreds of irregular, or questionable, new voter registrations that were turned into the board before the election. U.S. Attorney Greg White declined to comment Wednesday."

No word on whether they think the irregular voter registrations favored Kerry or Bush, but my hunch is that given how the FBI hasn't been investigating all of these other irregularities that favored Kerry... well, y'know... but yes, irregular voter registrations should be investigated, of course.

The morning papers

2004-12-01T23:54:00.000-08:00

Here's a new blog providing an important service that Rotten Denmark has been too slack in performing ourselves -- compiling each day a linksheet to the articles in the mainstream media and newspapers related to the questions about the November 2 irregularities. No, we have no idea why it's called Grady the Cat, either. But as the author points out, there is much more coverage of irregularities than there was two weeks ago.

Hout (Rhymes with pout or hoot?)

2004-12-01T23:18:00.000-08:00

We've been lazy in not yet tackling or dissecting a critique of the Hout report written by a statistician at Drexel University. We're gonna try to get to that sometime this week. Honest.

But in the meantime, Mickey has linked to Kevin Drum's Washington Monthly points about the Hout Paper from November 20. (Why is Mickey linking to news from November 20? Who cares! He's at least still on the story, even if he's on it from ten days ago! He'll be getting to the Juan Gonalez piece by December 13. Just in time for the electoral college!)

Drum cites sociologist Kieran Healey, and your little friends here at RottenDenmark talked about Kieran Healey's findings/postings on blog collective Crooked Timber in this post back on November 23 -- and what we said then still holds.

The evidence of the Hout paper may be that fraud was not systematic and statewide -- but in proving that not to be the case, both Drum and Healey suggest that there was something wrong, quite wrong, quite wrong and in need of explanation, in everyone's favorite two counties imitating vats of electoral cat piss, Broward and Palm Beach.

Could the Republican Party machine have been so better organized in Palm Beach and Broward -- two counties that are not Republican strongholds in any way, shape, or form -- such that they would do that much better in those counties than they had in 2000, and with a rate of improvement much larger than any other counties in the state?

Seems pretty fishy to me. Mickey? Now is not the time to be using Kausfiles to find out about unsigned LA area bands. The fate of the election is at stake! (Whose election? -- ed. Quit that!)

Ohio Provisional totals update, Chapter 831

2004-12-01T23:16:00.000-08:00

81 of 88 counties having reported.

Bush 51,077
Kerry 57,308

Bush New England campaign head indicted for 2002 phone-jamming scam

2004-12-01T17:43:00.000-08:00

Say this for the Democratic Party: the get out the vote operation is about getting the vote out. Not keeping the other side's voters in.

James Tobin, formerly the Republican National Committee's regional director and then the top Bush campaign official for New England -- yes, yes, but don't forget that Maine and New Hampshire were both swing state battlegrounds -- has been indicted on charges of orchestrating a low-tech version of a denial-of-service attack, setting up technology to block Democratic campaign telephones from reaching voters during the November 2002 -- that's 2002 -- election. Here's the AP's take on the story.

Internet DoS attacks overload a Web site's servers and cause them to be inaccessible. A simialr attack can be made on the phone networks, as Tobin is now accused of doing with five Democratic Party offices during Election Day, November 2002.

The four-count indictment says Tobin targeted the Manchester, NH, Professional Firefighters Association's phones in an attempt to interfere with its GOTV effort. Remember that 2002 saw one of the most tightly contested Senate races in the country, as Little Sununu beat Governor Jeanne Shaheen.

Tobin had resigned in October as Bush's 2004 New England campaign chairman, after allegations that he was involved in this classy business became public.

The indictment claims that Tobin and Chuck McGee, former executive director of the NH Republican Party, wrote a check for $15,600 to a Virginia company called GOP Marketplace, owned by GOP consultant Allen Raymond. GOP Marketplace allegedly hired a subcontractor to tie up the phones on Election Day by making hundreds of nuisance phone calls.

More than 800 hang-up calls tied up phones for about 1 1/2 hours.

NH State Democratic chairwoman Kathy Sullivan noted that she thought it was "unfortunate the Justice Department delayed, for whatever reasons that it did, until after the election... I hope this was not delayed for political reasons. Here we are, four weeks after the election, and President Bush's former New England campaign chairman is indicted.''

In 2002 Tobin was northeast political director for the Republican Senatorial Committee, the party operation working to elect Republicans to the Senate.

BREAKING NEWS: Abnormally High Totals for Third Party Candidates in Cleveland

2004-12-01T14:26:00.000-08:00

Juan Gonzalez, co-host of public radio's Democracy Now but also a columnist for the NY Daily News -- you know, that liberal rag that... oops, endorsed Bush for President -- takes on Ohio in his column today, entitled "Ohio Tally Fit for Ukraine."

In doing so, Gonzalez gives new fuel for the pro-recount forces, material I hadn't seen coming up in other recent articles. And though I've taken a skeptic's eye to many stories recently, the report he gives about abnormal third party totals in black Cleveland, if true, is enormous in its significance.

In the piece, Gonzalez reveals what he and fellow Daily News reporter Larry Cohler-Esses have discovered: more unusal vote totals in black neighborhoods. Here's Gonzalez:

And now Daily News reporter Larry Cohler-Esses and I have uncovered some more unusual vote totals, this time in black neighborhoods of Cleveland. Those results are from the precinct-by-precinct tallies released by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, where Cleveland is located.

In the 4th Ward on Cleveland's East Side, for example, two fringe presidential candidates did surprisingly well.

In precinct 4F, located at Benedictine High School on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, Kerry received 290 votes, Bush 21 and Michael Peroutka, candidate of the ultra-conservative anti-immigrant Constitutional Party, an amazing 215 votes!

That many black votes for Peroutka is about as likely as all those Jewish votes for Buchanan in Florida's Palm Beach County in 2000.

In precinct 4N, also at Benedictine High School, the tally was Kerry 318, Bush 21, and Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik 163.

Back in 2000, the combined third-party votes in those two precincts - including the Nader vote - was 8. Cuyahoga, like most of Ohio's 88 counties, uses punch-card balloting.

"That's terrible, I can't believe it," said City Councilman Kenneth Johnson, who has represented the 4th Ward since 1980. "It's obviously a malfunction with the machines."

But Peroutka and Badnarik polled unusually well in a few other black precincts. In the 8th Ward's G precinct at Cory United Methodist Church, for instance, Badnarik tallied 51 votes - nearly three times better than Bush's 19. And in I precinct at the same church, Peroutka was the choice on 27 ballots, three times more than Bush's 8. In 2000, independent candidates received 9 votes from both precincts.

The same pattern showed up in 10 Cleveland precincts in which Badnarik and Peroutka received nearly 700 votes between them.

In virtually all those precincts, Kerry's vote was lower than Al Gore's in 2000, even though there was a record turnout in the black community this time, and even though blacks voted overwhelmingly for Kerry.

If this same pattern held true in other cities around Ohio, then quite possibly thousands of votes meant for Kerry somehow ended up in the tallies of the two independent candidates. So far, however, precinct-by-precinct results have not been posted by boards of elections in other counties, but by Thursday all official results are due.

On Monday, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell will certify Ohio's results and then a manual recount will be requested by the Green and Libertarian parties.

The Badnarik and Peroutka surge was not the only unusual occurrence in Cleveland.

Also unusual was the drop in the Democratic vote in scores of precincts compared to 2000. But more on that next time.

Now, a drop in a Democratic vote alone isn't evidence of fraud or glitches. But Gonzalez's comparison of the Third Party presidential turnout in those precincts compared to 2000 is extremely damning. For third party candidates to go from 8 votes to over 250...

It's not even clear to me that the glitches here favored Kerry -- Bush's totals in those precincts look small even for extremely Democratic precincts. But that's not the point. The point is, something clearly went wrong in those precincts. And a hand recount is the only way to discern what exactly happened.

Great job by Gonzalez. I look forward to his next column...

Diebold giving it away

2004-12-01T13:04:00.000-08:00

Journalists giving money to Presidential candidates has long been frowned upon. I understand why -- they work in the public trust, they're supposed to be objective (well, they're supposed to be), and their work should be as unaffected by their own biases as possible, however difficult that may be.

I think similar expectations should be made of those those whose business it is to create the technology with which we conduct our elections. There's a similar role that the men and women running those companies play in working in the public trust, and it smells more than a little funny for them to be giving money to political candidates.

Especially when they're giving them to just one party.

I never took that seriously the Diebold quote about "giving Ohio to George W. Bush" as an actual promise to commit fraud through the voting machines. Thought that was a little bit of a reach from my lefty breatheren.

But I will say that I had no idea how extensive Diebold's giving to George W. Bush was until I looked here. (There's another list of them here, too, in a Google cache.)

It wasn't just Wally O'Dell, the President and Chairman. Who did give $4,000 to George W. Bush's re-election campaign.

It was Bart Frazzita, Vice President of the Security Division, who gave $2,000.

It was Gregory Geswein, Chief Financial Officier, who gave $4,000 to George W. Bush.

It was Michael Hillock, President of the International operations of Diebold, who gave $2,000.

It was Larry Ingram, Vice President in charge of Global Procurement, who gave $2,000.

It was Chuck Scheurer, Vice President of Corporate Human Resources, who gave $2,000.

It was Thomas Swidarski, Senior Vice President of Strategic Development and Global Marketing, who gave $2,000.

It was Jeffrey Van Cleve, Vice President of the Diebold Credit Corporation, who showed a little restraint, and only gave $1,500. C'mon, Jeff, you're never going to rise in this company if you're cheap.

And that's not even going into soft money, where Robert Mahoney, the Chair Emeritus, gave $15,000 to the RNC in 2,000, and where Wally O'Dell gave $3,950 to the RNC in 2001 and $2,015 to the RNC's Republican National State Elections Committee.

I don't hold it against people for giving money and supporting a political candidate of their choice. That's our system, flawed as it can be sometimes. (Just look at the Millionaire's Club the Senate has turned into, Democrats and Republicans alike.)

But the fact that the support of George W. Bush was so extensive in the leadership and management of one of the two or three top companies responsible for election technology in this country ... doesn't it just feel a little, y'know, weird to you?

Wheeeee!!!

Senator DeWine: "End Frivolous Efforts at Costly Recount"

2004-12-01T11:39:00.000-08:00

I can't help but note the irony that all the Republicans who are complaining about the costs of a recount were the same Republicans who didn't think twice about millions of dollars of citizen's money being used for something as constructive for the American future as, y'know, the Starr Report.

Case in point: GOP Senator Mike Dewine, who has issued this press release on the Ohio GOP website.

(Columbus) – U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine issued the following statement today regarding the results of Ohio’s presidential election and efforts to pursue a recount:

"Most Ohio counties have now certified their elections results, and it's mathematically impossible for John Kerry to win Ohio.

That's probably true, if there were no other irregularities or glitches in the counting process. Unfortunately, the fact that there were some creates a question if there were others.

That`s why Im now urging all parties to end their frivolous efforts to force a costly and divisive recount. Such a recount could never change the election outcome but it could stretch the budgets of many Ohio counties that are already financially hurting. It's been estimated that this unnecessary recount will cost 1.5 million dollars or more. Those funds could go to many more important uses, such as improving local schools, funding vital human services or rebuilding our state economy.

The absurd attempts by a few groups who are desperately trying to cast doubt on the outcome and the legitimacy of Ohio`s election results damage the very foundation of our democracy.

The day after the election, my colleague Senator Kerry nobly recognized the reality in Ohio and conceded. His actions proved that he wants to see America move forward to address the many challenges we face.

In the spirit of Senator Kerry`s eloquent concession speech, I call on all Americans to accept Ohio's election results and begin working together for our future."

Cute tactic, using Kerry's concession speech against his own best interests. Except Kerry also was speaking a) before the evidence of irregularities and glitches and questions had emerged and b) Kerry has been consistently 100% on message that every vote should and must be counted.

It also bears pointing out that the entire reason that a recount would be costly is because the Ohio State Legislature had never adjusted the law from 1956 that made recounts cost $10 per precinct to adjust for today's costs. That's their fault, their mistake. (And a GOP-dominated state legislature at that.) Again, we live in a culture where sports teams don't think twice of cities paying many more millions of dollars for sports stadiums. 1.5 million in the grand scheme of a state budget is not an enormous amount of money. And certainly not when it ensures the sanctity, trust, and confidence of the American people in the vote.

It also bears pointing out that according to this search, Mike DeWine received $1000 in 1999 from Diebold Chair Emeritus Bob Mahoney and $500 in 2000 from Bob Mahoney. In fairness to Senator DeWine, Ohio's other GOP Senator, George Voinovich, who was up for re-election this past year, received even more Diebold-related donations to his campaign efforts.

Olbermann interviews Blackwell

2004-12-01T11:23:00.000-08:00

Great, meaty post on Bloggermann today -- oh, okay, from the 29th, I had just missed it. The highlights:

* OH Sec of State Blackwell joined Keith on Monday night. (Jesse Jackson apparently joined Keith last night. I've been bad and haven't put Countdown on a Tivo seasonpass. Must do!) Keith: "It struck me as not quite coincidental that [Blackwell] finally joined us the same day the Ohio GOP issued what might be the first Republican recognition of any kind that there are questions about the vote - a news release with the gaudy headline “Democrats Struggle to Justify Unnecessary Recount / (Jesse) Jackson swoops in to fuel conspiracy theories even Kerry lawyers admit are baseless.” Apparently, Jesse Jackson's involvement has pushed the GOP out of silence. And as Keith said, Blackwell's reaction to Jesse -- “I think what happened is that Jesse Jackson ran around the block and tried to get out in front of a parade that was already on the march" -- is more than a little strange, in that his making reference to "a parade that was already on the march" kinda, well, legitimizes the recount effort in ways that even a Democrat couldn't hope to do. (But only Nixon could go to China...) Or as Keith writes, "Suddenly the recount itself seems like an old pal to Ohio’s top election official."

* Olbermann did get Blackwell on the record to claim that his office would not stand in the way of recount efforts. "Once they ask for a recount, we will provide them with a recount… we will regard this as yet another audit of the voting process.”

* Blackwell also claimed this: Badnarik and Cobb “have a standing, not Jesse Jackson, and because Senator Kerry has conceded and has not asked for a recount he has no standing, and so I would anticipate that the Electoral College will be held on the 13th of December and 20 votes will go to the certified winner.”

* Keith then says that he had limited time, and chose not to ask Blackwell about the "inexplicable" Warren County lockdown of vote-counting. He explained that choice because he figured Blackwell would evade that question with "Ohio has a delicately balanced bi-partisan system that counts votes at the local level. I have nothing to do with counting the votes." So instead, Keith asked whether or not Blackwell had met with President Bush, in Ohio, on election day. “That’s just hogwash, absolutely zero, not true. And it’s the sort of mythology that grows out of, you know, a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands and the imaginations of Jonathan Swift.” Well, there's a gauntlet thrown down: anyone see that meeting take place?

* Keith then notes that "the salient point seems to be that -- as was meekly forecast here some time ago -- as the prospect of the actual recount loomed, the story would be driven into the mainstream medi. Why, even CNN’s Inside Politics interviewed Jackson briefly Monday - and the Reverend’s use of the new F-word (fraud) seemingly motivated Blackwell to go on the record (and bring up Jackson’s presence in Ohio eight times after I stopped asking him about Jackson)." Apparently, Keith says, Jackson did not repeat in his CNN interview his "strong weekend comments about Kerry supporting the Ohio investigations, which to me implies again that the only people more sensitive to the prospect of Kerry participation in the recount than the Republican Party, is the Democratic Party. This eludes my capability for analysis beyond what I have written here previously about the pulling back of last week’s news release by the Ohio Dems because it read the Kerry/Edwards campaign “joins” the recount, and its replacement a few hours later by an otherwise identical statement saying the Kerry/Edwards campaign “participates in” the process."

Washington Governor's recount update

2004-12-01T11:08:00.000-08:00

There might be absolutely nothing on the DNC webpage about the 2004 presidential election irregularities -- well, okay, there is this press release applauding the GAO investigation and this November 18th press release about the DNC continuing a commitment to promoting and protecting voting rights post-2004 election -- but the DNC is not being namby-pamby in supporting a fundraising effort to pay for a hand recount in Washington State, where a machine recount mandated by law cut Dino Rossi's lead over Attorney General Chris Gregoire in the Governor's race from 260 to 42 votes. 42 votes separating the two candidates, out of the millions of voters in the entire state of Washington.

Hit that link, give money to the effort, make every vote count. The DNC site says they need to raise $750,000 to pay for the recount.

Now, I know that some readers might think, okay, so the Democrats just want to keep recounting and recounting until they get a result they'd like. But there's a big difference between a machine recount and a hand recount, in terms of hand recounts picking up the differences in the undervote, the cards that haven't been punched or marked well enough for machines to pick up on them but reflect a clear preference of candidate, anyway.

BREAKING: WashingtonPost: "Kerry Team Seeks to Join Fight to Get Ohio County to Recount"

2004-12-01T09:05:00.000-08:00

If you doubted the Green Party website, then try to doubt the Washington Post.

Sen. John F. Kerry's presidential campaign asked an Ohio judge yesterday to allow it to join a legal fight there over whether election officials in one county may sit out the state's impending recount.

A pair of third-party presidential candidates, who said that reports of problems at the polls on Election Day are not being addressed, are forcing the Buckeye State to recount its entire presidential vote. But David A. Yost, a lawyer for Delaware County, just outside Columbus, won a temporary restraining order last week blocking any recount there. He told the Columbus Dispatch that a second count would be a poor use of county resources. President Bush won the mostly Republican area handily, unofficial results show.

Lawyers for the Kerry campaign asked to join Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb, Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik and the National Voting Rights Institute in the fight to force the county to participate in the recount. "If there's going to be a recount in Ohio, we don't want it to exclude Delaware County or any other county that might decide to follow Delaware County's lead," Kerry lawyer Dan Hoffheimer said. "It should be a full, fair and accurate recount."

Bush won the critical battleground state by approximately 136,000 votes, a victory that also won him a second term.

Cobb's lawyers filed papers yesterday asking a federal court to take over the case, which is scheduled for state court.

The Ohio Supremes

2004-12-01T08:50:00.000-08:00

Here's today's Guardian on today's soon-to-be-news, as today a group of Democratic voters will allege widespread fraud and challenge Bush's victory in Ohio's Supreme Court.

BREAKING NEWS: Recounts in Nevada and New Mexico Being Sought!

2004-11-30T18:42:00.000-08:00

And even the Washington Post is covering it. The recount effort is being paid by a 527 organization called the Help America Recount Fund, but being done in the name, again, of Badnarik and Cobb.

Now, I have not heard of many stories of irregularities in Nevada and New Mexico.

In fact, from much of what I've read, Nevada had one of the better run/conducted elections in the country, a model for other states.

That said, the totals/margins in both of those states were slim -- a slimmer 6,000 or so in New Mexico (a difference of .8 percent of the total vote, well within many states' percentage threshold for an automatic recount) than a 21,500 margin or so in Nevada.

I have yet to see case made for a recount in Nevada. I'd be interested in what the rationale of the Cobb and Badnarik people for a Nevada recount is, given that there were states that Bush eeked out a win with a smaller margin, namely Iowa where the margin of victory was less than 1% with a margin of 10,059.

Update: I'm wrong -- Nevada was the site of one of the "Republican groups caught destroying Democratic registration documents" situations.

SF Chronicle on voting reform

2004-11-30T17:09:00.000-08:00

Excellent overview piece by Wyatt Buchanan in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle on the push for Ohio recount and voting reform.

Jesse opines about Ohio

2004-11-30T17:01:00.000-08:00

Here's Jesse Jackson's op-ed piece from today's Chicago Sun-Times. He adroitly starts with describing the dire situation... in the Ukraine. Highlights:

Ohio is this election year's Florida. The vote in Ohio decided the presidential race, but it was marred by intolerable, and often partisan, irregularities and discrepancies. U.S. citizens have as much reason as those in Kiev to be concerned that the fix was in. Consider:

In Ohio, a court just ruled there can't be a recount yet, because the vote is not yet counted. It's three weeks after the election, and Ohio still hasn't counted the votes and certified the election. Some 93,000 overvotes and undervotes are not counted; 155,000 provisional ballots are only now being counted. Absentee ballots cast in the two days prior to the election haven't been counted.

Ohio determines the election, but the state has not yet counted the vote. That outrage is made intolerable by the fact that the secretary of state in charge of this operation, Ken Blackwell, holds -- like Katherine Harris of Florida's fiasco in 2000 -- a dual role: secretary of state with control over voting procedures and co-chair of George Bush's Ohio campaign. Blackwell should recuse himself so that a thorough investigation, count and recount of Ohio's vote can be made.

Blackwell reversed rules on provisional ballots in place in the spring primaries. These allowed voters to cast provisional ballots anywhere in their county, even if they were in the wrong precinct, reflecting the chief rationale for provisional ballots: to ensure that those who went to the wrong place by mistake could have their votes counted. The result of this decision -- why does this not surprise? -- was to disqualify disproportionately ballots cast in heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County.

Blackwell also permitted the use of electronic machines that provided no paper record. The maker of many of these machines, the head of Diebold Co., promised to deliver Ohio for Bush. In one precinct in Franklin County, an electric voting system gave Bush 3,893 extra votes out of a total of 638 votes cast.

Blackwell also presided over a voting system that resulted in quick, short lines in the dominantly Republican suburbs, and four-hour and longer waiting lines in the inner cities. Wealthy precincts received ample numbers of voting machines and numerous voting places. Democratic precincts received inadequate numbers of machines in too few polling places that were often hard to locate; this caused daylong waits for the very working people who could least afford the time.

In Ohio, as in Florida and Pennsylvania, there was a stark disconnect between the exit polls and the tabulated results, with the former favoring John Kerry and the latter George Bush. The chance of this occurring in these three states, according to Professor Steven Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania, is about 250 million to 1.

In one of dozens of examples, Ellen Connally, an African-American Supreme Court candidate running an underfunded race at the bottom of the ticket, received over 257,000 more votes than Kerry in 37 counties. She ran better than Kerry in the areas of the state where she wasn't known and didn't campaign than she did where she was known and did campaign.

There should be a federal investigation of the vote count in Ohio, with the partisan secretary of state removing himself from the scene.

In Cleveland, as in Kiev, Ukraine, citizens have the right to know that the election is run fairly and every vote counted honestly. Citizens have the right to nonpartisan election officials. Citizens have the right to voting machines that keep a paper record and allow for an independent audit and recount.

This country needs no more Floridas and Ohios. This shouldn't be a partisan issue. We call for a constitutional amendment to guarantee the right to vote for all U.S. citizens and to empower Congress to establish federal standards and nonpartisan administration of elections. Harris and Blackwell are insults to the people they represent, and stains upon the president whose election they sought to ensure. Democracy should not be for export only.

One problem: I was under the impression that Blackwell tabled the use of electronic voting machines until 2008, that Ohio will have the punchcard ballots and optical scan ballots. (The machines made to scan the optican scan ballots are made by Diebold, but I think Jesse got the facts about the touchscreen machines wrong here.) And I think Jackson makes a mistake in lending much faith in exit poll discrepancies or the Freeman report.

But give this to Jesse -- the guy does know how to write. That last paragraph is a doozie.

BREAKING NEWS: Kerry-Edwards campaign lawyers join Greens and Libs in trying to overturn Delaware County judge's ruling

2004-11-30T16:51:00.000-08:00

A few conservative sites we've seen have claimed that what they have seen as a shrinking interest/involvement by the Kerry Edwards campaign in recount activities indicates that the Ohio recount and questions about irregularities are a dead issue.

That's a very nice thought.

But I wonder, then, what to make of this. Where after attorneys for Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb asked a federal court judge to turn over a Delaware County judge's restraining order preventing a recount in Delaware County, Attorneys representing the Kerry-Edwards campaign filed papers in Delaware County to intervene, adding their voice to defend Cobb and Michael Badnarik's efforts at a recount.

The issue here being, should a state election for Presidential electors be under federal jursidiction? Mongo say yes yes.

Regardless, I can't imagine the Kerry-Edwards lawyers would be joinng in and filing papers in Delaware County today if they had decided that it wasn't a worthwhile issue to get a recount in all the counties. So much for the Kerry-Edwards are running away from the recount theory.

Ohio provisional totals update

2004-11-30T13:29:00.000-08:00

With 75 of 88 counties reporting, including Democratic stronghold Cuyahoga (where only 2/3rd of provisionals were accepted, compared to a 78% rate statewide), the totals for the provisionals are:

Bush +46,847
Kerry +52,126

At about 99,000 provisional votes, this means that only about 10-20,000 provisional ballots remain to be counted. And right now, Kerry has cut Bush's margin down by only 6,000 votes. Bringing Bush to something like 125,000 ahead of Kerry. Or so.

You think it's easy to keep coming up with Ohio headlines?

2004-11-29T18:03:00.000-08:00

Activists continue to challenge Ohio ballots, says this AP story being run -- and given a link on the splash page -- of CNN.com. (The link on the splash page says that challenges are "mounting." Now there's an encouraging gerund!) The lede graph:

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- Nearly a month after John Kerry conceded Ohio to President Bush, complaints and challenges about the balloting are mounting as activists including the Rev. Jesse Jackson demand closer scrutiny to ensure the votes are being counted on the up-and-up.

Jackson has been holding rallies in Ohio in recent days to draw attention to the vote, and another critic plans to ask the state Supreme Court this week to decide the validity of the election.

It gets better.

Jackson said too many questions have been raised to let the vote stand without closer examination.

"We can live with winning and losing. We cannot live with fraud and stealing," Jackson said Sunday at Mount Hermon Baptist Church.

I know that our friend Dirty Harry says that Jesse just wants to be in the headlines, but c'mon, Harry, Jesse hasn't been in headlines for a couple of years. It's nice to have him back, especially given that, unlike Reverend Al, Jesse has actually a record of standing up for some good things when some Democrats have been shy to do so. (Please, let this not be an invitation for a discussion of the heinous Hymietown incident.)

What's the big news here? Apparently, a group called Alliance for Democracy plans to file a "contest of election." The request requires a single Supreme Court justice to either let the election stand, declare another winner or throw the whole thing out. The loser can appeal to the full seven-member court, which is dominated by Republicans 5-2.

That's the Ohio Supreme Court, mind you. Yes, I know, when I first read it, I was getting pumped for J. P. Stevens or David Souter to throw Ohio out, too.

There's a Blackwell spokesperson saying there were irregularities, but not more so than usual. (Great! That's an encouraging statement!) There's mention of the Franklin County/Gahanna machine glitch. Then there's mention of the undercount. Then there's Jesse's admittedly terrific metaphor for Blackwell's Katharine Harris like position of co-chair of the Bush in Ohio efforts, calling for Blackwell to recuse himself from recount matters. "You can't be chairman of the Bush campaign and then be the chief umpire in the seventh game of the World Series," Jackson said.

More on the John, Errr, Ellen Connally Theory

2004-11-29T15:43:00.000-08:00

The last couple of days, I couldn't help but notice that the same names seem to emerge in the last forty or fifty years of American conspiracies. Just yesterday, we were talking about Lorain County in Ohio... which shares its name, albeit spelled differently, from the motel in Memphis where Martin Luther King was shot.

Now, in the latest Ohio irregularity to emerge -- thanks in no small part due to the megaphone-like announcement of the Reverend Jackson -- we have a Connally theory. Spelled differently. Not involving the late Governor of Texas who happened to be sitting in the same convertible on that awful day in Dallas, but instead, involving a retired African-American judge named C. Ellen Connally who received a net 45,000 more votes in Butler County relative to her Republican opponent than Kerry did relative to his -- and this for a black judge from Cleveland in a conservative, rural county on the Indiana border, 40 miles north of Kentucky. Not exactly the Dixiecrat choice. Oh, and in an election year when the Republican candidates in the three Supreme Court races raised 40% more in official campaign funds.

So, it's a little weird. And did I mention that Kennedy's secretary was named Lincoln and Lincoln's secretary was named -- sorry.

We've been a little too busy at our day job today to get too far into it -- but thankfully, Rodger Payne, political scientist from nearby Louisville, has picked up the slack in looking at the Connally strangeness.

Update: We originally had an email Rodger sent us, but now he's posted to his own blog about it, with a few minor corrections:

Note also that Bob Fertik raised the issue on democrats.com on November 22. He even has a link to a spreadsheet, though I didn't open it. Michael Froomkin links to another partisan blogger who has addressed the issue as well.

Specifically, the controversy concerns the vote totals earned by C. Ellen Connally in the four SW Ohio counties. Connally was running as a Democrat for Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice. In some counties, she did much better versus her Republican incumbent opponent than did Senator John Kerry against his.

Connally is an African American woman from Cleveland who was running against Ohio Chief Justice Thomas Moyer. I found a website apparently dedicated to impeaching Moyer, but it seems to be a dead link. The complaint can found on a broader court watch website, but the charges are marshalled by a single individual from Columbus. I couldn't really find any other reason for Moyer's relative weakness as a candidate.

In any event, Moyer won the race fairly handily, 53.4% to 46.6%. Bush, by contrast, won by only 51% to 48.5% over Kerry. Well, those are the totals until the provisional and absentee ballots are added to the totals, apparently tomorrow.

The Moyer-Connally results were reported as 2.3 million to 2 million as recently as November 17.

For some time, the Presidential contest in Ohio has been reported as 2,796,000 Bush to 2,660,000 Kerry. Note that Bush beat Moyer by nearly half a million votes and Kerry outpolled Connally by 660,000 votes. In other words, as per usual, the presidential candidates received many more votes -- and Kerry did better relative to his Republican incumbent foe than did Connally.

So what was Jackson talking about?

To get the latest data, I looked at the Butler County, Warren County, and Clermont County websites. In these suburban Cincy counties,the Dem candidate for Chief Justice polled better than Kerry did, even as the Rep candidate for Chief Justice got significantly fewer votes than Bush did. Put simply, Connally actually got more votes than Kerry in one of the most Republican areas of the state -- far from her Cleveland geographic base:

Butler results (with rounding):
Bush 109,900, Kerry 56,200
Moyer 68,400 Connally 61,600

Warren County results (with rounding):
Bush 68,000 Kerry 26,000
Moyer 45,000 Connally 28,500

Clermont County results (with rounding):
Bush 62,900 Kerry 25,900.
Moyer 43,600 Connally 30,000.

These are true anamolies. Look at the rest of Ohio's results and you cannot readily find similar oddities.

Warren, by the way, was the security "lockdown" county. Election officials cited terrorism concerns and closed the count to the media on election night.

How did Moyer lose 40K Republican votes in Butler County while Connally gained 5K over Kerry? Strange.

In Warren, Moyer lost 23K Republican votes, Connally gained 2.5K votes.

In Clermont, Moyer lost nearly 20K votes compared to Bush, Connally gained over 4K.

It seems very odd to me (and to the various observers noted above) that Connally did substantially better than Kerry in terms of absolute votes in these three Republican counties.

In "net" win-loss terms, tens of thousands of Republican voters in these heavily Republican counties apparently ignored their judicial candidate (on a night when gay marriage and judicial activism was apparently on their minds), while thousands of Democrats actually liked their top judicial candidate more than they liked Kerry.

On paper, it looks like many tens of thousands of votes might have been attributed to the wrong person. Remember how the Indiana voting machine gave straight Democratic votes to the Libertarians? Something like that might have been at work.

It's the kind of oddity, when paired with the weird exit poll results, suggest a need to recount the Ohio votes. If a vote for one candidate is accidentally given to his or her opponent, then that's a two vote swing. A margin of, say, 136,000 votes could be reversed if merely 68,000 votes statewide were misallocated.

Hamilton County has not yet updated its election night results. The "old" early November data for Hamilton shows a somewhat similar oddity, though Connally didn't get more votes than Kerry. She did, however, do much better relative to Moyer than Kerry did against Bush. Thousands of "net" votes better...

In Hamilton County, Moyer lost 5 Bush votes to every 3 Kerry votes Connally lost. Bush won Hamilton County over Kerry 215,600 to 191,000; Moyer won over Connally by 168,300 to 160,000. This one seems more plausible to me than the suburban results, but they do seem a bit mystifying. In the other two Supreme Court races, the R outpolled the D in Hamilton by an average of about 80,000 votes. The Rs got roughly 200,000 votes to the D's 120,000. The same trends were apparent in Butler County, where the R justice candidates won nearly 2-1, and in both Clermont and Warren counties, where the Rs won by about 70-30 margins.

Why was Connally so apparently strong in Republican areas far from her geographic base?

Statewide, Kerry not only outpolled Connally by 660,000, he also won a substantially higher percent of the vote. Why would Connally do so much better, relative to Kerry, in the heavily Republican area of the state...and so much better than the other Dem judicial candidates?

In Cuyahoga County which Kerry won by about 2-1 (66% to 32%), Connally won by only 60-40. That's her geographic base and she did not do as well as Kerry. Indeed, she received 145,000 fewer votes there while Moyer got only 16,000 fewer than Bush.

Republicans might be interested in these results, of course, because it could be that votes for Moyer were actually given to Connally.

Something seems to be odd.

Odd, or maybe a little rotten. These are good questions!

Jesse takes Ohio... and a weird, new irregularity

2004-11-29T09:02:00.000-08:00

It's alive, it's alive, says Keith Olbermann in his latest blog post.

Jesse Jackson has thrown himself into the thick of it in Ohio. "'John Kerry supports a full investigation' of the voting irregularities in Ohio, the Rev. Jesse Jackson told reporters Saturday before he began two days of rallies in the state to push for an investigation - and a recount. 'I talked with John Kerry last night (Friday), and he supports the investigation,' The Chicago Sun-Times further quoted Jackson. 'His lawyers are observing it closely.'"

More than that, there's a new weird Ohio irregularity that has yet to be explained. More from Keith:

Well, evidently Rev. Jackson can observe the body twitching even if the rest of us are still where we were when Senator Kerry made his direct-to-video, M.C. Escher drawing of a statement: “regardless of the outcome of this election.” We’re scratching our heads with one hand, and wanting to use the other to poke the tall, supine creature with a stick to see if it really is alive.

Several reporters on Saturday’s conference call asked about the event that ensured the mainstream media silence that has been roundly mistaken as a “lock-down”: Senator Kerry’s concession speech on November 3rd.

“Kerry was inclined to believe what he was told,” begins Jackson’s quote in The Cincinnati Enquirer, “and he was told the election was over. But now we’re unearthing information that did not surface at first. I suppose the more information Kerry gets, the more you will hear from him.”

In his news conference and at his rally Sunday in Columbus, Jackson hit the now-familiar main points of the Ohio inquiry. He called the disconnect between exiting polling and actual voting “suspicious,” invoked the infamous Multiplying Voting Machine of Gahanna, cited the Warren County lockdown, and criticized Kenneth Blackwell’s dual role as Ohio’s Secretary of State (and thus its chief electoral official) and as Co-Chairman of the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign there. Love him or hate him, Rev. Jackson still has the knack for perfect imagery. “We need to investigate, coordinate, litigate, recount and recuse. Mr. Blackwell cannot be both the owner of the team and the umpire.”

But Keith has buried the lede:

Jackson may or may not have also introduced a new rotting fish into the pile of evidence that suggests Ohio did a very lousy job of running an election four weeks ago. “We don’t want to be presumptuous, but these numbers in Butler, Clermont, Warren and Hamilton counties are suspicious.” Jackson refers in part to what several voters’ groups see as the incongruity of an underfunded Democratic candidate for the Ohio Supreme Court, C. Ellen Connally, getting a net 45,000 more votes in Butler County relative to her Republican opponent than Kerry did relative to his. She finished ahead of her party’s presidential nominee by 10,000 net votes or more in five Ohio counties; by 5,000 or more in ten others.

It is not unprecedented for a statewide candidate - especially a popular, well-publicized one - to finish “ahead of the ticket.” But Connally was a retired African-American judge from Cleveland, and Butler County is as about as far away from Cleveland (on the Indiana border, and 40 miles north of Kentucky) as you can get and still be in Ohio. Moreover, The Cleveland Plain Dealer noted that the Republican candidates in the three Supreme Court races raised 40% more in official campaign funds than did Connally and the other Democrats. The Toledo Blade showed that the fund-raising, and thus visibility, was far more lopsided than even the party documents would suggest: “Citizens for a Strong Ohio, a nonprofit arm of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, raised $3 million to fund TV and radio ads that gave the winners exposure Democrats couldn't match,” the newspaper reported on November 4th.

The fun continues throughout the Buckeye State. The Cincinnati Post Saturday quoted Chairman Tim Burke of the Hamilton County Board of Elections as saying that approximately 400 of the 3,000 provisional ballots invalidated in his jurisdiction were thrown out for an extraordinary reason. In some cases, one polling place served more than one voting precinct - and though they were in the correct building, voters were disqualified because they got in the wrong line. “400 voters were in the right place,” Burke says, “but not at the right table.” The newspaper says Burke plans to object to those disqualifications when Hamilton County meets Tuesday to certify its vote.

Other discarded provisional ballots will be sued over. Cuyahoga County tossed a third of all its provisionals, and a group called ‘The People for the American Way Foundation’ filed Friday for a writ of mandamus against Secretary of State Blackwell in the 8th Ohio District Court of Appeals, asking the court to order Blackwell to notify each of the 8,099 disqualified voters and afford them the opportunity to contest their disenfranchisement.

And lastly, though he legally has until December 6 to certify the Ohio vote, Cincinnati television station WCPO reported Sunday that Blackwell is in fact expected to do so on Wednesday of this week.

Yes, whether it's "mathematically impossible" or not for John Kerry to win this -- and it only is likelyl impossible if we accept the tabulations up until now as legitimate -- every vote should be counted. And every irregularity should be explained.

Dixiecrats

2004-11-29T08:04:00.000-08:00

We had already explained the "Heavily Democrat counties in Northern Florida voted heavily for Bush" phenomenon, a couple of weeks back, by affirming that those conservative Democrat counties -- Dixiecrat counties -- had gone for Dole in '96 and Bush in 2000.

But just in case anyone is still skeptical about those Northern Florida counties, the Miami Herald held an independent vote count that confirmed Bush's win in Northern Florida.

Last week, The Miami Herald went to see for itself whether Bush's steamroll through North Florida was legitimate. Picking three counties that fit the conspiracy theory profile - staunchly Democratic by registration, whoppingly GOP by voting - two reporters counted more than 17,000 ballots over three days.

The conclusion: No conspiracy.

The newspaper's count of optical scan ballots in Suwannee, Lafayette and Union counties showed Bush whipping Sen. John Kerry in a swath of Florida where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 3-1.

The newspaper found minor differences with the official results in each county, most involving a smattering of ballots that had been discarded as unreadable by optical scan machines but in which reporters felt the voter intent was clear.

Under the optical scan system, voters fill in an oval or darken an arrow by a candidate's name on a card. A machine reads the card optically.

Wrinkles aside, the Herald count confirmed that Bush's message sold in a part of the state where many voters may be Democratic by registration only.

"They're not going to vote for a Northeast liberal," summarized Lafayette County Judge Harlow Land, director of the county canvassing board.

Kerry had solidly won the battle in South Florida, where touch-screen machines do not create a ballot paper trail that can be checked. But Bush won the war in Florida by dominating elsewhere, particularly in the 52 counties that use optical scan ballots, which can be checked for accuracy.

Republicans had often done fairly well in those counties, but this year more so.

And it was on those counties that the critics focused. Democrats outnumber Republicans by about 340,000 voters in the 52 optical scan counties, but Bush took them by about 340,000 votes - a 680,000-vote swing that assured him of winning the White House.

The Herald total: 3,393 votes for Bush and 1,272 for Kerry. There were 15 votes that couldn't clearly be counted.

The official Union County total: 3,396 votes for Bush, 1,251 for Kerry and a few dozen that couldn't be counted.

"The difference is in the under-over votes," Montpetit explained. The Herald concluded voter intent in a couple of dozen cases that optical scan readers could not discern.

The rest of the article is a good read.

But as the Hout Report and others have shown, the question is not Northern Florida and hasn't been for some time. The question is Southern Florida, in the touch-screen counties. Counties like Broward and Palm Beach that, though Kerry won the counties, experienced abnormally strong Bush turn-out that went against the 2000 experience and all demographic patterns, causing what Hout described as a "smoke alarm" situation meriting attention and answers. Given that Florida was the only "swing state" which experienced such a strong change from 2000's results, there still have not been explanations for Bush's strong performance here. (Our best shot at a plausible, no funny business explanation is that the hurricanes helped Bush. But then again, in 2000, he had the Elian controversy helping him. But then again, in 2000, Lieberman helped the Democrats on the Eastern coast of Florida! But then again, in 2000, Lieberman probably alienated the Redneck Riviera! So confusing!)

Note: We at Rotten Denmark, from what we've read, accept the explanation that one of the reasons for Bush's 3.5 million vote margin can be revealed in comparing Bush's performance in non-swing red and blue states to the swing states.

While, except for Florida, Bush's performance in swing states varied little from 2000 -- he lost New Hampshire and won Iowa and New Mexico, but the margins were slim in 2000 and slim in 2004 -- Bush did significantly better in non-swing red states like Utah and Idaho and non-swing blue states like Connecticut and California than in 2000.

Why? Because while Kerry and the 527s focused all of their advertising dollars on targetted advertising in swing states, Bush aired much of his advertising on national cable. This might have seemed like Bush was paying money to reach lots of voters he didn't need to reach, in states he was either never going to win or had in the bag, but it meant also that people in Utah or upstate New York were seeing many Bush advertisments throughout the campaign season and few Kerry ads, if any. Whether this was conscious or not, who knows -- no doubt Rove would say after the fact is was all part of the plan -- but it did rack up the popular vote totals nationwide for Bush, even though it did not play a part in the electoral vote strategy.

So the theory goes, anyway, and I find it more than plausible.

Cuyahoga at 66%

2004-11-29T07:47:00.000-08:00

The Plain Dealer reports that the People for the American Way Foundation filed suit Friday in the 8th Ohio District Court of Appeals in Cleveland against Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell and the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.

Why? Because while most counties in Ohio threw out about 10-15% of their provisional ballots, in Democratic stronghold Cuyahoga, 8,099 ballots out of 24,472 provisional ballots were thrown out -- invalidated. That was, by far, the largest single body of controversial ballots in any of Ohio's 88 counties.

The suit, a mandamus action, asks the court to compel a public official to perform a duty. Blackwell, the suit says, failed to provide clear instructions to poll workers and precinct judges about how to handle the provisional ballots.

"People for the American Way wants the court to order Blackwell and the county elections board to check electronic voter-registration rolls against paper registration records, to notify each voter who cast an invalidated ballot why it was rejected, and to give that person a way to contest the invalidation.

The suit also wants ballots counted if voters cast them in the wrong places and officials failed to send them to the right polling places."

Before the GOP whines again about "activist judges," blah blah blargie doh doh, remind them that they weren't making such complaints on November 2 when they sued to have their pollwatchers present in voting places, despite the seemingly redundant presence of non-partisan pollwatchers in such locations.

Whether he was intentionally perpetuating fraud or not, it's clear that Kenneth Blackwell has done everything in his power to discourage and suppress turnout in key urban precincts.

The Secretary of State of Ohio has one big job: make elections run smoothly. Just as it shouldn't have been a surprise that there was going to be huge voter turn-out, and Blackwell's office inadequately equipped urban precincts with enough voting machines, it shouldn't have been a surprise that there were going to be tons of provisional ballots.

And it shouldn't have been a novel concept that there should have been standards and instructions for all of Ohio's counties in how to count and consider them.

Blackwell already attempted -- after the election! -- to after-the-fact require these ballots to have a date-of-birth listed on them, even though people filling out the ballots weren't told that information was required when they filled them out.

Thankfully, that attempt was blocked. But after the fact, Blackwell succeeded in maintaining that provisional ballots that were submitted in precincts that weren't the voter's original precinct should be thrown out. That's ridiculous. It's easy enough to check and see with the voting records if someone had voted elsewhere, and avoid any double voting shenanigans within one's state.

I said in a post yesterday that I think it's mathematically unlikely that if all the totals we have now are legitimate, John Kerry will find enough votes in provisional ballots and the undercount to win Ohio.

But I think there are far too many questions at this point over the legitimacy of totals to not proceed with a recount.

Is it possible for John Kerry to win Ohio?

2004-11-28T20:08:00.000-08:00

Dirty Harry says it ain't, or, if not impossible, it's bloody well unlikely even if several things broke John Kerry's way with both provisional ballots and the undercount (punched ballots that, for whatever reason, did not register in the machine recount).

Let's look.

Give this to Harry -- he takes the provisional totals from this blog that's sympathetic to the efforts to explain and reform the irregularities and suppression incidents of November 2. I'm not sure where Ohio Vote Suppression News -- which has done a terrific job compiling county by county news and information -- gets their totals, but as of Saturday, with 65 of 88 counties reporting -- but several larger, urban, Democratic counties not having reported -- we have the following totals:

Bush +36,050
Kerry +32,490

Bush began with a margin of about 130,000 votes, so figure now that he has a lead of 133,500.

The current percentage of provisional ballots which have been accepted by the authorities has been 77%. Note, though, that, since Secretary of State Blackwell did not institute any across-the-state standards for acceptance of provisional ballots, you have a county like Lorain County where only 32% of provisional ballots were accepted. (In Lorain, 702 of the 1,264 provisional ballots rejected were rejected for "improper registration" reasons -- while in nearly all other counties, "the largest percentage of rejected provisionals is due to ballots cast in the wrong precinct. Here, however, these amount to 160 and are apparently not part of the 702." FWIW.) Also Cuyahoga County, home of Cleveland, has been accepting about 66% of their provisional ballots.

How many provisional ballots, total, were issued in Ohio? According to this website from Blackwell's office, 135,149. But according to this article from the AP, and several other ones I found on Google, there were 155,337 provisional ballots. Given that the rest of the Blackwell site has not been updated -- the results listed here from election night still only reflect 8% of precincts! -- let's take the number 155,337 as the total.

If we take 77% of 155,337, to represent the number of the provisional ballots that were accepted, that gives us 119,609 total accepted provisional ballots. When we subtract the provisional ballots already counted (68,540), that gives us 51,069 ballots yet to be counted.

Let's say that Kerry wins a huge majority of those 51,069 ballots. Let's say he wins 75% of them. (Unlikely, but not impossible, given that many of those outstanding ballots come from urban areas.) Kerry wins 38,302, Bush wins 12,767.

That would then make the provisional ballot results total:

48,817 Bush
70,792 Kerry

Which would give Kerry a margin of 21,975 in the provisional ballot total.

Let's subtract that from Bush's previous margin of 133,500 in the overall vote. That would leave Bush still ahead of Kerry by 111,525 votes after the provisional ballots have been factored into the mix.

But what about the undercount, involving those ballots that do not register a vote for a particular race, often due to machines being unable to read the punch on a punchcard ballot? (Two Dayton precincts, for example, had the strange occurrence of over 27% of their voters not voting for a Presidential candidate; surely there are some voters who don't vote for any Presidential candidate, but 27%?)

If the recount that Badnarik and Cobb have filed for goes through, as I think it will, will a hand recount reveal an undercount that can drag Kerry across the finish line?

The Cleveland Plain-Dealer has reported that there were 92,000 spoiled ballots. Let's say that two thirds of those spoiled ballots go for Kerry, with a third going for Bush. (Surely, a great number of those spoiled ballots will show preference for neither candidate, but let's just play with this for a second.) That gives Kerry 61,333 votes, and Bush 30,667 votes from the undercount, which gives Kerry a margin of about 30,666 within the undercount vote.

That would bring Bush's margin of victory in Ohio to about 80,859 votes. And that's with generously assuming that 75% of the remaining provisional ballots break for Kerry, and generously assuming that Kerry wins two-thirds of the 92,000 spoiled ballots.

Let's push plausibility even further. Let's say that Kerry wins all of the spoiled ballots. Bush would still have a margin of over 20,000 votes.

(Yes, I said in a previous post that I thought Kerry would chop the margin down to 30,000. I was pulling a number out of an orifice whose statistics should not be trusted.)

What does this mean?

It means that if the Plain Dealer's estimate of 92,000 spoiled ballots is accurate, the only way that Ohio is going to end up in John Kerry's column is if a hand recount reveals that there were significant other glitches or irregularities -- accidental or intentional -- in the already tabulated totals that create a shift of 40,000 votes from Bush to Kerry, or where 80,000 votes for Kerry somehow were not tabulated, or where 80,000 votes for Bush that were tabulated did not exist.

How you look at this depends on how much confidence you look upon the systems used to tabulate the votes, and how much confidence you have that a situation like Warren County's lockdown resulted in no funny business at all.

We know that the tabulation system can be hacked, and easily; but did someone actually hack it?

We know that it's strange that Franklin County's glitch on one machine added 4,000 votes to Bush's totals, but do we think that there's a possibility that if one machine had that glitch, there could be other machines that could have done the same thing in the state? (Many have theorized that anyone wanting to commit effective electoral fraud would not focus on individual machines, but the systems that tabulate the vote totals from hundreds of those machines.) All it would take is twenty other systems to have the identical glitch as that Franklin County one for Bush to lose that 80,000 vote margin.

Obviously, those of us pinning any hopes to John Kerry somehow staging the ultimate comeback in December of 2004 have to come to grips with the sheer unlikelihood of that happening. The Red Sox winning the World Series probably filled the quota for the amazing miracles of 2004.

But just as obvious is the fact that should the recount not occur, there were too many strange glitches and irregularities that will go unexplained, and will severly mar the confidence with which we approach the computer systems and technologies with which we conduct the basic execution of democracy.

Have there been enough accidental glitches across the country, consistently favoring George W. Bush, to give one skeptical pause regarding the accuracy of the totals? I believe there have.

Has the Republican Party earned the benefit of the doubt in an election year where they back-channelled money to pay for an advertising campaign that lied in painting a war hero as a war criminal...

where they took RNC dollars to pay for leaflets announcing that the Democrats intended on banning the bible...

where after complaining about activist judges and touting tort reform they sued to have the right to place partisan poll watchers in urban polling places that already had pollwatchers present...

where the wife of the Vice President publicly described the Democratic presidential candidate as "not a good man"...

where the blatant disregard for church and state separation resulted in ignoring churches' tax free status by using churches as political outreach centers far, far, far outdid any outreach the Democrats ever made with black churches in the city...

where within a few months we watched as the rationale for a war shifted from allegations of involvement in 9/11 to funding terrorist activities to producing weapons of mass destruction to controlling the energy supply to simply taking a dictator down...

-- Has the Republican party earned the benefit of the doubt that without a recount in Ohio, given the irregularities present, we can be confident that everything was copasetic, that, yes, nothing was rotten in the state of Denmark?

I believe we cannot.

And that's why we the Ohio recount should go forward.

I ask my Republican friends to support a recount, so as to let George W. Bush serve his second term with no Roger Maris asterisk like that which hovered over his head during his firs termt.

But more importantly, I ask them to support a recount for the love of this country, and the recognition of how fractured it remains. When 20% of the voting population things Bush was not legitimately elected President this time around, let's have a recount to assauge and affirm that nothing went wrong in Ohio -- y'know, beyond the ridiculously long lines in urban polling centers and Republican pollwatchers hovering within the ballotplaces like a relic of Jim Crow.

Let us have the recount so that people can feel sure and confident that our democracy works.

That's what's happened so far in New Hampshire; they've been having the recount, and it's been dispelling worries and affirming the effectiveness of the Diebold systems.

We've watched in the Ukraine this week as people took to the streets in the name of assuring the sanctity of their democracy.

Here in our country, we do not need to take to the streets. All we have to do is support the right of Michael Badnarik and David Cobb's campaigns to register and pay the fees, as dictated by Ohio law, to see a recount take place and earn the assurance that every vote was counted in that state.

Our democracy will only be stronger for it. I certainly support putting up a million dollars for that, given how freely this administration has spent billions in far, far worse pursuits. In a year where the two political campaigns spent half a billion dollars or more, a million dollars is not a huge price to assure Americans the certainty and sanctity of the franchise.

Hamlet vs. Prince Hal

2004-11-28T17:51:00.000-08:00

Dirty Harry claims here that Mr. Kaus is getting bad info. We'd beg to differ. The GELAC link on the Kerry website has not been prominently displayed on the splash page of the JohnKerry.com website for "months." Since November 2, maybe. We're still figuring that out. So there.

Harry predicts that a recount is not a sure thing, since according to his arithmetic, Bush will come out with a lead remaining of 120,000-130,000 once the provisionals are all totalled up, and that even if through a miracle of science Kerry wins all the undervote -- 93,000 votes, according to Harry -- Bush will still lead in Ohio by 30,000 votes. I plan on reviewing this later tonight, after dinner. Really.

"If 100% of the spoiled ballots won't put Kerry over the top, why have a recount?" asks Harry.

Well, unfortunately, Harry, after glitches give 4,000 extra votes to Bush, Republican counties lock down the ballot counting, and there are other widespread stories of vote suppression, a recount is what's going to take to give people confidence in the integrity of the vote. Don't you think it's a problem when 20% of the population doesn't think George W. Bush was legitimately elected President? I sure do, and I don't understand why any Republican wouldn't support a recount, so as to further corroborate the integrity and accuracy of the vote that elected their President.

Look, Ohio has a recount mechanism. There's a law in place, and Badnarik and Cobb and gang are following the law. Harry makes mention of a decision in Delaware County that has stopped the recount there, if only temporarily, but I can't find any other mention of such a development off Google News.

Harry does have a good thread here where his posters start to re-enact the Donner Party, eating each other. Even his GOP-leaning posters can't agree on what Bush's lead will be once a recount is finished and the provisionals have also been totalled up. It's fun reading.

RecountOhio

2004-11-27T13:51:00.000-08:00

Recount Ohio has been taking ads out on the Cincinnati Enquirer website, among other places. The website is pushing for John Kerry to fight for a nonpartisan recount in Ohio (and, in fact, has a petition to push Kerry and the DNC to get involved), as well as building awareness and mobilize Ohio citizens. The site is also making the not-exactly-illegitimate claim that, due to Secretary of State Ken Blackwell's status as co-chairman of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio, he might not be the most neutral, non-partisan figure to oversee any kind of recount effort.

The website also has the details on Ohio's recount procedures:

Any losing nominee or candidate in a primary, general, or special election can request a recount. Also, a group of five or more voters can request a recount on a question or issue. The recount process begins by filing a written application with the Board of Elections of each county in which votes are to be recounted. R.C. 3515.01. The application must be filed within five days after the results were declared. R.C. 3515.02. The application must also list each precinct within the county where votes are to be recounted, and for each precinct a $10 deposit must be paid. R.C. 3515.03.

If the margin of victory of the nominee, candidate, or issue is less than one-half of one percent of the vote, section 3515.011 of the Revised Code triggers an automatic recount in all county, municipal, and district elections. An even slimmer margin —one-fourth of one percent—triggers an automatic recount in a statewide election.

Since Bush won Ohio without as slim a margin as required to have an automatic recount, Badnarik and Cobb, the Libertarian and Green Party presidential candidates, respectively, filed the paperwork and fees to get a recount in place. You might have heard of a judge finding against them last week, but that was only to stop the effort to have the recount begin sooner than December 6, when the votes are certified by the state. No recount will begin until after the vote totals are certified.

But, from all accounts, a complete hand recount will happen, and happen within a week and a half. Wheeee!

Conspirate ships

2004-11-27T13:49:00.000-08:00

We've had more than a few readers forward us the Wayne Madsen-written story about a deep conspiracy behind the election that involves everyone except for the Trilaterial Commission and the Parallax Corporation. It didn't pass our credibility meters -- and look, many stories of irregularities and glitches do -- and I'm glad to see that it doesn't pass Keith Olbermann's bullshit detector, either.

Money quote from Keith:

None of this is written to downplay the disturbing nature of the Warren County incident. Nor is it posited even to dismiss the many who see in the various failures of electronic voting around the country nearly four weeks ago not just incompetence, but malfeasance. Hell, if a shred of Mr. Madsen’s story is true, I’ll pay his expenses when he goes to pick up his Pulitzer Prize.

But in a time when serious investigations of what did or didn’t happen on November 2nd are vital to the sanctity of our voting process, reporting - in the mainstream media and on the internet alike - has to be solid and reasoned.

And we agree. Forwarding Madsen's story around only does harm to the considerable questions and investigations involving the November 2 elections that do have merit. Feeding into the notion of the Reynolds Wrap-hat wearing crazies does us little good. There are legitimate questions that need to be answered, just as some have already been answered and debunked. Let's continue that process, pushing for answers, without immediately assuming that every discrepancy can be explained by a deep, dark conspiracy.

Though, really, what was up with that Warren County lockdown?

Three weeks (and two days) later

2004-11-26T17:15:00.000-08:00

If you're first discovering this site through the magic of Kausfiles, welcome. I'm feeling it's time for a where-we're-at check-in for all readers. So here are where things are as of today.

- While they're avoiding anything looking like they themselves are requesting a recount, the Kerry Edwards campaign has started raising funds specifically for legal costs and recount costs on their website. (Update: Someone emailed us that this GELAC link has been on the K-E website since Election Day. I, however, for what it's worth, am not sure that's right -- I'd made several visits to JohnKerry.com since Election Day (y'know, out of nostalgia, loneliness, an interest to relive some of those foreign policy speech barnburners), and only came across the prominently placed GELAC link within the last week or so. But I'm open to the idea that I'm wrong. Corroboration?)

They have sent a hoard of lawyers to Ohio -- though not, as far as I can tell, to Florida or any other state -- on what they have strenuously described as a "fact-finding" mission.

They have also said that while they have not requested a recount, if a recount goes forward -- as it seems that it likely will, at the behest of Libertarian Party Presidential Candidate Michael Badnarik and Green Party Presidential Candidate David Cobb -- the Kerry Edwards campaign would participate in supporting that recount.

That recount will probably not begin until after December 6, when the votes in Ohio have to be certified. The Electoral College meets on December 13 to vote, but their votes are not "revealed" until the new year, by the newly sworn in Congress.

John Kerry sent an email statement to supporters last week reaffirming that he is committed to every vote being counted. His sending out an email is fairly big news, in that it acknowledges concerns and questions. You don't send an email out saying that dog bites man.

Ohio is not a state that made use of touchscreen voting. It is, however, a state that made use of technology created by Diebold and other companies to count and tabulate optical scan ballots, which make up a significant minority of Ohio voting (the rest being our old friends, punch ballots). Those computer systems have been proven to be easily hacked into; whether they actually were hacked in, there's no evidence, but one thing that all this talk has created is the awareness that even if the vote wasn't hacked, it could have been, and easily, and, y'know, let's fix that.

It's clear that the Kerry campaign is walking a tightrope -- making it clear that they acknowledge the discrepancies and unexplained irregularities from November 2, while not wanting to appear in any way like sore losers, but still seeking to ensure that the vote count from November 2 is as accurate as possible.

The provisional ballots for the first 50,000 provisional ballots counted have broken slightly for Bush, but the largest (read: urban; read: Kerry) counties have yet to submit their results, and there are probably 80,000 more votes left to tabulate, given that there were 150,000+ provisional ballots and about 80% of those were accepted.

- 13 (or maybe 14 if Rep. Schakowsky of Illinois signed on) Democratic congressional representatives -- including the ranking members of several of the most important committees in the House -- have called for a General Accounting Office investigation into the irregularities and aberrations in Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Indiana, and elsewhere. The GAO this week announced that they will indeed hold a non-partisan investigation, focusing on voting technologies and glitches, and not, for example, exit poll discrepancies or suppression stories. This helps to legitimize and publicize the issue of the irregularities.

- In New Hampshire, Ralph Nader successfully filed for a recount in a small number of the Granite State's 88 wards (or parishes) where Bush seemed to do anomalously well, particularly in urban areas. These were wards that employed Diebold and other electronic technologies, not for touchscreen voting machines that leave no paper trail, but instead with optical scan ballot systems that do leave a paper trail, with Diebold manufacturing the machines that tabulate the ballots. However, in the first few wards to be recounted, the hand recount has not provided much difference at all between the original machine-tabulated totals.

- The Survey Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley, led by sociology professor and member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences Michael Hout, published a paper entitled "The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections." The paper suggested the following: 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. The paper also suggested that the researchers had run similar tests with Ohio and had not found such irregularities.

- There has still not been suitable explanation for several other situations and glitches in Ohio, including in Warren County, where local authorities locked the press and others out of the vote-counting area, claiming terrorist alert concerns that the FBI denies having made. (The county was a heavy source of Bush votes, and just recently the Cincinatti Enquirer reported that the lockdown plan had been, in fact, made several days before commissioners had previously said that it had been decided.) Or the curious case of Franklin County, where a glitch in tabulation gave George W. Bush an extra 4,000 votes. There have also been computer glitches reported in North Carolina and Indiana, two states which, while never considered swing states, helped solidify Bush's margin in the popular vote. (Though one plausible explanation for Bush's popular vote margin is that his choice to advertise on national cable -- while Kerry focused only on swing states -- helped him build larger leads from 2000 in non-swing red states, as well as do better in non-swing blue states where Kerry advertising was also nowhere to be found.)

- News coverage has varied, and the lack of coverage from the press has been surprising. Aaron Brown did do a piece on CNN this week on the irregularities and questions, the NY Times did run an editorial a week ago saying that answers were necessary, and the GAO investigation did get some play in the newspapers. But other than Salon and MSNBC, most news sources have avoided much coverage except for debunking the early irregularity rumors -- of exit poll discrepancies and of Democratic counties in Florida voting for Bush, the latter being debunked easily when those Dixiecrat counties were also shown to have supported Dole in '96 and Bush in '00. There has been a surprising lack of coverage of the Hout Paper from Berkeley, in which respected, experienced professors in statistical analysis deemed that something was very off in Florida and required further investigation. The more prominent sites of the blogosphere have been similarly cold to cover the irregularities, save for Kausfiles.

Further details about all the above can be read below in previous posts. The story isn't over, not by a long shot. The Ohio recount will be starting December 6, and the GAO Investigation will be under way. It is not yet clear whether officials in Florida will respond in any way to the Hout Paper from Berkeley. And it will be interesting to see what the next steps of the junior senator from Massachusetts will be.

In the meantime, hope you all are having a happy Thanksgiving. Keep visiting for further updates.

Oh, and the Dylan autobiography is, it turns out, a really good read. Who knew?

RD

Provisional Ohio: 100,000 (okay, maybe 80K after they threw some out) left to go!

2004-11-26T13:50:00.000-08:00

Here's the latest on the provisional counting in Ohio. With 64 of 88 counties reporting, we have the following results:

Bush +29,285
Kerry +23,947

If you read Kausfiles, it may sound like Bush is shockingly soaring to winning the provisional ballot sweepstakes and cementing his Ohio victory.

But remember that there were 155,000+ provisional ballots, and with almost 80% of provisional ballots reported to have been accepted, that means that those numbers are probably 40% of the total number of accepted provisional ballots.

And also remember that those other 60% of the provisional ballots? They're coming from Ohio's largest counties, including Democratic strongholds like Cuyahoga.

What this does, mean, however, is that Kerry was prescient in the hours before his concession in realizing that he was not going to win Ohio based solely on the provisional vote tally. If Bush did not win a single other vote beyond that 29,285 votes, it would still be impossible for Kerry to surmount the 130,000 gap between him and Bush.

Kerry was prescient in that regard. What he did not expect or know was how many other glitches and irregularities would shake up people's faith in the integrity of the voting process.

But cheer up, Kerry fans. What can possibly happen is that Kerry could still do well enough in the urban counties' provisional ballot counts to chop the margin between him and Bush to 50,000 or so.

Which is at least a smaller margin to surmount by the recount... that won't start until after the votes are certified by December 6. And then, let the chad examination begin!

New T-shirt slogan: BELIEVE IN THE UNDERCOUNT!

Aaron Brown stops the silence

2004-11-25T08:55:00.000-08:00

You can't say Keith Olbermann is alone in covering this stuff. Aaron Brown on CNN -- actually, my favorite broadcaster, with objectivity and humor in abundance -- took a step out of the media silence fog last night. (Okay, it wasn't the first time he had discussed the irregularities.)

I missed the actual broadcast, but here's the transcript. You have to go down aways to get there. Oh, hell, here it is:

BROWN: Saw a poll today showing that 80 percent of the country believes the president won the election in a fair vote. The other 20 percent write me. We have no reason to believe the election wasn't fair, but, oddly, we have less than perfect confidence that the votes were counted accurately. No one, we suppose, expects 100 percent accuracy in such things, but how much error is too much error? And perhaps a better question still, will we ever know?

BROWN (voice-over): Bev Harris, a citizen activist who first brought national attention to the problems with voting software, is now in Florida pursuing internal computer records for what she calls a forensic audit.

BEV HARRIS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, BLACKBOXVOTING.ORG: I think we can talk, you know, until the cows come home about what might happen and could happen and what's theoretical, and the best thing we can do is just go get the records and see what did happen.

BROWN: She's not alone. A number of experts are now looking and looking hard at not only fraud, but the possible effects of simple computer error, the kind of dumb mistake that ruined the Hubble telescope and sent Mars missions astray. So how accurate was the 2004 vote count?

DR. REBECCA MERCURI, VOTING TECHNOLOGY EXPERT: Basically, 80 percent of our votes, for the most part, we really don't know. We haven't taken the time to look into it.

BROWN: Some examples. In Franklin County, Indiana, a programming error was applying Democratic votes to the Libertarian Party. After a recount, the winner on election night is now the loser. In North Carolina, over 4,000 ballots are gone forever, lost when a voting machine passed its arbitrary limit. In South Florida, election officials were horrified to see vote totals start counting down after they hit 32,000.

What is even more disturbing, a statistical study done at U.C. Berkeley indicates that there could have been similar counting problems in all Florida counties that use touch-screen voting machines.

MERCURI: The type of testing that you need is really being done at Election Day, as opposed to being done before Election Day.

BROWN: In Washington today, in an office so new you could still smell the carpet glue, the Federal Election Assistance Commission admits it is only beginning the process of creating national standards.

DEFOREST SOARIES, CHAIRMAN, U.S. ELECTION ADVISORY COMMISSION: Every voting machine that was used this year was certified against standards that were 1990 standards.

BROWN: The chairman promises intensive federal audits, audits to guarantee eventually voter confidence.

SOARIES: We're going to go down to the ground on this much further than we've ever gone before. I don't take the opinion, and neither does my commission, that what you don't know won't hurt you.

BROWN: And the debate will go on.

"We have no reason to believe the election wasn't fair." Cough, cough.

That said, a) this kind of break in the media silence is terrific and b) though he doesn't really explain the import of the Berkeley study -- c'mon, Aaron, burying the lede about the 130,000 excess votes? -- he still mentioned it.

For the final word, we'll go to Olbermann on his blog:

Which reminds me that it was mildly encouraging to see some focus given to this entire topic Tuesday night by my old CNN cohort Aaron Brown. A carefully-worded segment included a laundry list of the problems we’ve been reporting on Countdown for the last three weeks, and compared them to “the kind of dumb mistake that ruined the Hubbell telescope.” Brown referenced the UC Berkeley study on the prospect of 130,000 phantom votes in Florida (though he didn’t mention its conclusion that all of them went to President Bush), and even had about fifteen seconds of Blackbox’s Bev Harris and her slog through the computer printout records in Florida.

Whatever your stance on any of this, the media silence has been fairly odd, given how much coverage Specter and DeLay have been receiving.

Zogby calls for investigation

2004-11-25T08:46:00.000-08:00

John Zogby made it clear on Countdown that he thinks all the questions about this election have not been explained -- and why 4 out of 5 Americans thinking Bush was elected legitimately is not exactly good news.

“But, Keith, 20 percent don’t think the president is legitimate. And worse yet, if you take the other half, those that didn’t vote for him, about half of the other side doesn’t think the president is legitimate. That just hasn’t existed for a long, long time in our system. We need to restore, I think, some semblance of legitimacy and honor to the system.”

“I think it's in the interests of the nation that we study what happened in this election and widen that, let's study what happened with the exit polls, and let's come out with a definitive conclusions by a blue ribbon panel to restore the legitimacy of this election.”

Zogby thinks he knows the steps to take to do that. The first is for those who are raising questions, to keep doing so. “I can reassure them they’re not crazy for asking. It’s not just those who are far out, it is indeed many respectable, responsible people.” The pollster says he’s heard from thousands of them, asking him to get involved in their various causes and investigations, so many he can’t answer them all.

“I’ll take this opportunity right now to say I think that it’s in the interest of healing this country and restoring some unity to this country for us to have a thorough investigation of what happened both to the election and with the exit polls.” Zogby called for the proverbial blue-ribbon commission into the voting irregularities, and the full release of the exit polling data.

And he encouraged the recounts, even when, as they have in the first three of the nine precincts in New Hampshire, they have varied by just fifteen votes from the original count. The second tally in Ohio, Zogby says, “certainly is useful, but I don't think its enough…I called this election for months the Armageddon election, and in that context, one of the things that we discovered throughout our polling was the fact that there were going to be significant numbers, on both sides who were not going to accept the legitimacy of the other guy winning, especially if it was close election.”

Do they have reason? With three weeks’ reflection, he’s not convinced there was an altered vote - accidental or otherwise - at least not on “a grand scale.” But Zogby says the “system is not geared for a close election like this” and if “many millions of people… don’t think that their vote was counted accurately,” the results are almost as bad as if an election was rigged, or decided by static charges in a thousand computers.

New Hampshire recount update

2004-11-25T08:18:00.000-08:00

While most of the eyes of those who follow irregularities have been trained on Ohio and Florida, Ralph Nader has been focused on New Hampshire, where he raised funds to pay for recounts in a few wards in the Granite State that seemed to experience anomalous turn-outs in support of Bush and which also utilized electronic voting systems to tabulate optical scan ballots.

A New Hampshire recount -- in a state which Kerry won, and a state where a reversal of electoral votes would make no impact on the Presidential election -- was about verifying the integrity of the technology we are quickly employing in the mechanics of our democracy.

Russ Baker reports in the Nation on the progress so far in Concord. Baker describes the recount as focusing on "precincts where results went strikingly against current statewide trends and past localized ones: a kind of under-the-hood check of the controversial private-sector machinery that increasingly drives the ballot-counting process and has drawn the skeptical scrutiny of activists throughout the country."

The results so far? They would, as Baker notes, "reassure the most skeptical among us that Diebold's much-criticized optical-scanning machines (35 percent of votes nationally are now opscan-counted) do a surprisingly good job of reading hand-marked ballots."

In the two wards where official recounts were posted, the vote totals hardly changed at all. In Litchfield, both Bush and Kerry gained three votes--precious little out of more than 5,000 ballots cast. In Manchester's Ward 7, with a similar number of voters, Bush's total remained the same, while Kerry picked up three.

Baker commends the recount as an exercise which reveals both what's good about our voting system and what needs to be fixed.

His piece also includes descriptions like this, a rare scene of Republicans and Democrats working together:

There's something reassuring about watching a trio of Democratic, Republican and Naderite observers intensely scrutinizing document after document and broadly agreeing with each other on the intentions of each voter. In addition, the monotonous seriousness of the undertaking is frequently relieved by evidence of the determined individuality of the American voter--the write-in votes for "God," the straight-ticket Republican voter who deviated only to write in Ralph Nader's name and the editorialist who left Bush's name alone but pointedly and emphatically crossed out Cheney's.

Punctuating the hushed, at times reverent atmosphere of the counting hall in a nondescript corner room in New Hampshire's low-security Legislative Office Building is the occasional ejaculation "Object!" by an official observer who has found fault with an incorrectly or ambiguously marked ballot. The fate of these challenged documents is generally left to the seasoned eye of the secretary of state, in this case New Hampshire's William Gardner, a fourteen-term Democrat who is widely respected and appears studiously fair. Of course, the objectivity of the process will depend greatly on local conditions. In Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004, many questioned the neutrality of election officials who were also self-avowed partisans.

Baker says that New Hampshire has important lessons to offer:

- New Hampshire refuses to use any technology that doesn't leave a paper trail, eschewing the black box touch-screens that -- I didn't realize this -- record the votes of 29% of Americans. Every New Hampshire voter fills out a paper ballot, which is then counted with optican scanners. "Transparency is the only way to go," Baker says. This means that as long as a candidate can afford to pay for a recount, the citizens of New Hampshire can be confident that their votes will be properly counted. Florida citizens can't have the same confidence in the integrity of their system, given how many counties use the touch-screen technology down there.

- This has affirmed the role thirty parties can play. "Only a candidate can ask for a recall. With Bush having no incentive to do so, and Kerry having no interest in contesting the results in a state he won, there would be no advocate for accountability if Ralph Nader had not been in the race."

New Hampshire isn't without its problems -- the straight-GOP ticket has always been listed first on the ballot, and "numerous studies have found that ballot sequence determines preference in enough cases to make a decisive difference, especially in close races." And even having the "Straight-vote system" -- where in voting "Straight Democratic," all unmarked specific races are assigned to that party's candidate -- creates problems, as all unmarked spaces are assumed to be votes for the favored party. After marking "Straight GOP," if you try to vote for a Democrat elsewhere on the ballot, it doesn't register.

But the real question remaining: if the recount isn't, so far, showing any problems with the technology, then why did Bush get suspiciously high amounts of votes in urban Democratic precincts in New Hampshire?

Russ Baker's explanation: "although many of those urban Bush voters were Democrats, they were socially conservative, and many were Catholics who had been targeted by implicitly anti-Kerry letters from their bishop and leafleting campaigns in church parking lots."

Besides, "in other precincts, Kerry did fairly well among moderate Republicans who couldn't stomach Bush but who were not especially socially conservative."

So is everything A-OK in New Hampshire? Not completely, no.

"The hand count of a third precinct showed roughly 100 fewer presidential votes than the optical-scan machines had, and will likely have to be recounted yet again. And in a fourth one, a local Republican candidate being recounted was awarded 105 more votes than he had before. Was the problem Diebold or somebody in the counting room? The answer will soon be clear."

Another recount in Washington?

2004-11-25T08:08:00.000-08:00

The machine recount, mandated by law in Washington State for tight margin elections, has resulted in Dino Rossi's margin falling from 261 to 42 votes.

Yes, that's 42 votes out of 3 million cast.

Christine Gregoire's campaign is talking about a recount. My first reaction was, c'mon, you can't just keep demanding recounts until you get a result you like. Concede, give it up.

Except here's the thing: machines recounted the votes that they counted the first time, and that wound up with a change in 200 votes. So much for machines being error-free.

Hand recounts -- however costly they are -- provide a result people in which people can feel confident. Especially when the machine recount results in a 200 vote difference from the first machine count. We haven't had a hand recount yet.

(Did I mention that this story should, once again, emphasize the importance of having a paper trail?)

That said, when Christine Gregoire's campaign talks about only aiming their efforts to a few counties, I start to cringe. However much more money it might mean, I think that if there are going to be hand recounts, they ought to be statewide, and not just favoring the pick-and-choose districts that might favor a particular candidate. If you're going to recount King County, then recount the counties in the conservative eastern part of the state, too.

Warren County Lockdown update

2004-11-24T13:20:00.000-08:00

Here's the latest from Erica Solvig at the Cincinatti Enquirer, who has been tenaciously covering the curious case of Warren County, Ohio, where the press and others were locked out from the ballot counting, citing a terrorist concern and "an increased threat"; this was later contradicted by Federal and local homeland security officials who said there was no such evidence of any increased threat or need for concern

"County Commissioner Pat South has said the decision to lock the doors election night was made during an Oct. 28 closed-door meeting (the Thursday before Election Day).

But in e-mailed memos dated Oct. 25 and Oct. 26 - released Monday after an Enquirer public records request - other county officials were already detailing the security measures, down to the wording of signs that would be posted on the locked doors."

Hmmm.

Hmmmmmmmm.

GAO speaks!

2004-11-24T08:05:00.000-08:00

There was this press release on the GAO website, dated yesterday:

Statement of the Comptroller General on Election-Related Matters November 23, 2004

GAO has received a number of comments pertaining to the recent national election processes. In the past, GAO has conducted a range of federal elections-related work, including broad-based systemic reviews primarily focusing on issues relating to federal election requirements and technologies. We also have ongoing and planned work relating to systemic election issues, involving reviews of voter registration processes, provisional voting, and voting technologies. In addition, GAO has reviewed federal entities charged with overseeing various aspects of election-related activities. For example, we recently issued a report on actions taken by the Department of Justice to investigate and pursue violations of federal laws related to voting irregularities emanating from prior national elections.

1 You may obtain copies of our published election-related reports on this web site. While GAO has and will continue to do certain elections-related work, we are not authorized to engage in enforcement efforts relating to specific allegations of voting irregularities. Under the nation’s legal framework, elections are a matter largely reserved to, and regulated by, the states.

2 Thus, many of the issues relating to the recent election are primarily the responsibility of state and local jurisdictions, since they involve the implementation of state law and regulation. As a result, general questions concerning these issues, as well as specific allegations of voting irregularities, should be addressed to state and local officials, such as the Secretary of State or the State Attorney General.

Congress has, however, asserted its prerogatives under the Elections Clause of the Constitution (Article 1, Section 4, Clause 1) to impose certain procedural requirements on federal elections through such federal statutes as the Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act, both of which are enforced by the Department of Justice. In this regard, questions or allegations regarding federal voting irregularities generally are addressed by one of three federal entities.

The name, areas of responsibility, and contact point for these entities are:

• The Civil Rights Division, Voting Section, at the Department of Justice: responsible for enforcing federal voting rights statutes. Information about how to file a complaint through the mail or by telephone can be found at the link above.

• The Criminal Division, Public Integrity Section, at the Department of Justice: responsible for enforcing federal criminal laws applicable to federal election fraud offenses, among other things, in conjunction with the 93 U.S. Attorneys. Information about how to contact the Criminal Division can be found at the link above.

• The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC): serves as a national clearinghouse and resource for information on the administration of federal elections. Information about the EAC can be found at www.eac.gov.

Specific allegations of voting irregularities should be addressed to the appropriate authority as described in the above framework. I assure you that GAO will continue to do its part in connection with important elections issues consistent with our scope of responsibility and authority.

So with specific problems and questions concerning irregularities that favored George W. Bush, we should turn to the DOJ, headed by Ashcroft and then Gonzales? Thanks, GAO!!!

The GAO investigation is happening, it's clear that this is a press release saying, "We can investigate and look at the situation, but we can't prosecute." But they can review and investigate those encharged with prosecuting!

In all seriousness, the GAO investigation is a big step. Let's continue moving forward, and getting adequate answers and explanations for what happened -- and what went wrong -- November 2.

Ohio can wait

2004-11-23T17:31:00.000-08:00

The Greens and Libertarians were suing to try to get the recount to begin before all the votes in Ohio had been certified. (Mostly due to the ticking clock from after that deadline of December 6 before the electoral college meets around December 13.) A judge has now ruled against any recount beginning until after the votes have been certified by Ohio. Can an entire state hold a recount within a week? (Though they do have until January when Congress opens the votes...) We'll see.

WAaaaaaa

2004-11-23T16:21:00.000-08:00

There hasn't been talk about irregularities in Washington State. That's because there haven't been big reports of them.

It's just a state where, when you have a close race -- and with a 261 vote margin in this year's gubernatorial race, it qualifies as a veryclose race -- there's an automatic recount mechanism. Still, it's interesting to read about their recount and how it works, as in this nice recap in DailyKos.

60% of Washington's counties have done their recount, and the result is that Republican Rossi's lead has been extended to 286 votes. However, those 60 counties only represent less than 25% of the 2.88 million votes originally recorded.

That said, the State GOP head is kind of - what's the technical jargon -- a prick.

GOP head Chris Vance has been making a larger-than-usual ass of himself by bringing suit in federal court to interfere with the King County recount as it proceeds. He wants the elections officials to stop the practice of examining ballots that fail to register votes, in order to enhance the voter's clear intent. In many cases, the voter may have outlined an oval, or used a checkmark or an "X", or circled a candidate's name, or written in a name that already exists on the ballot, or any of a hundred other ways to not follow clear instructions. In such cases, election officials -- both a Democrat and a Republican -- will often agree on what is unequivocally the voter's intent, and mark a ballot such that it will be accurately recorded. If they don't agree, the disputed ballot goes to a county canvassing board (again, with bipartisan membership) for adjudication.

Here's the problem with the GOP's lawsuit: it's, big surprise, only objecting to the process in King County -- that's Seattle -- which is a) the biggest county in the state and b) by far the most likely source of a significant increase in the number of votes for Democrat Christine Gregoire.

I'd like to point out that the Ohio recount efforts that I support are for all counties -- Republican and Democrat, urban and rural. Recount them all with the exact same standards.

BREAKING NEWS: GAO to investigate election complaints

2004-11-23T14:06:00.000-08:00

The GAO plans to investigate the security and accuracy of voting technology, a group of Democratic lawmakers said Tuesday. This is in response to the four letters sent by fourteen Congressional representatives calling for an investigation in response to fifteen truckloads worth of irregularities, discrepancies, and other situations that would give any civic-minded lover of democracy a strong case of hives, anger, and the willies. From the CNN report -- which was prominently linked at the top of the CNN website as of 1pm Pacific Time, though the Rather resignation is the big story of the day:

The GAO said it will not investigate every charge listed by the Democrats, but will examine "the security and accuracy of voting technologies, distribution and allocation of voting machines and counting of provisional ballots."

A spokeswoman for one of the lawmakers requesting an investigation, Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, said the goal is not to overturn the election results, but rather to improve the mechanics of the voting process.

"We are hopeful that GAO's nonpartisan and expert analysis will get to the bottom of the flaws uncovered in the 2004 election," said a statement released by Conyers and five other members of Congress.

As part of the inquiry, the group said it will provide copies of specific incident reports received in their offices regarding the election, including more than 57,000 complaints provided to the House Judiciary Committee.

Those reports include allegations of computer and voting machine problems that added votes to totals, as well as malfunctions that resulted in votes being thrown out.

What is the GAO leaving out, if they're focusing on voting technologies, distribution and allocation of voting machines, and counting of provisional ballots? The only thing I could come up with would be anecdotes or accusations of suppression of the vote within particular precincts. Oh, and exit polls. Thank God, exit polls aren't a part of this; talk about a dead fish of an argument to be pushing.

I don't know about you, but I'll be eager to write checks for the 2006 campaign to the following Congressional Representatives:

John Conyers, Michigan
Jerrold Nadler, New York
Louise Slaughter, New York
Gregory Meeks, New York
Robert Wexler, Florida
Bobby Scott, Virginia
Melvin Watt, North Carolina
Rush Holt, New Jersey
John Olver, Massachusetts
Bob Filner, California
George Miller, California
Barbara Lee, California
Tammy Baldwin, Wisconsin
(Note: I'd also read on Buzzflash that Jan Schakowsky of Illinois had also joined the effort.)

These Congressional Representatives deserve our kudos, support, and hosannas. At the very least, they deserve our phonecalls thanking them. 202.224.3121 is the general number. You can find individual contact information for the representatives at their websites linked above.

Whatever the results of any recount efforts or investigations, make no mistake about it: there were more than enough discrepancies and irregularities from November 2 going unexplained to require an investigation from the General Accounting Office. I am glad that we're now going to get one.

Now if only the media would join with an investigation of their own.

Update: a friend who is a reformed former environmental policy lobbyist cautions me about getting too excited about the GAO. "We, the environmental political movement, used GAO reports religiously - because we were right and the GAO knew that...and members of Congress would tell us - time and time again - "you're going to have to do better than the GAO." [Senator no longer in office] once told me: 'If I wanted to investigate why my wife cries at funerals, the GAO would both take it on and get it wrong.'"

However, I replied that even if the GAO alone can't do it -- WAKE UP, NEWSMEDIA -- the fact that the GAO has announced the investigation can be an important step to pushing irregularities and the Hout Report further into the mainstream media. It legitimizes, it reaffirms, it encourages efforts, it keeps the issues from being pushed aside.

Again, the fact that it received such a high link on CNN.com is a good sign, potentially of good things to come. I'm eager to see whether there will be much coverage tomorrow.

Update II: Here's the press release in .pdf format from the House members announcing the investigation.

Derelection2004.org

2004-11-23T13:10:00.000-08:00

is another good clearinghouse focusing on much Election 2004 fall-out and media coverage. Check it out, if you haven't already.

Let's take apart the machine, see how it works

2004-11-23T13:06:00.000-08:00

An old friend of RD, a graduate student in computer science at the University of Washington, writes:

Have you heard of any e-voting machines that researchers can get their
hands on?

The inner workings might be complicated, but the configuration
I'm guessing is not outside the grasp of some dedicated grad students.
They could at least examine some well-known problem scenarios and see
what happens. This seems critical to me, and I haven't heard of it taking
place.

Perhaps some enlightened communities could be convinced to lend their
machines to universities for investigation.

Of course, I imagine the manufacturer will not be cooperative.

Revenge of the sociologists

2004-11-23T10:59:00.000-08:00

One of the particularly dumb conversations, which only particularly dumb 20 year old men could have, that I remember having when I was a particularly dumb 20 year old man was about what majors were "hot." Which majors in college -- particularly the university we attended in Providence, Rhode Island -- seemed to attract the most attractive women, yes, but also which majors, when chosen by a woman, made her more attractive to us.

The friend of mine who enabled this conversation and I disagreed over the plusses and minuses of several majors -- he liked the little green or red books that classics majors always seemed to be reading on the main green, while I thought Comp Lit majors, reading Flaubert not in translation, held great mystery beneath the dark sweaters and behind the clove cigarettes. And art history majors, of course, resided in their own special eschelon.

But one thing we agreed on: sociology majors. Feh. Sociology seemed like the most boring major around. And often seemed to attract their fair share of boring people majoring in the field. Then one of my best friends married a sociology professor, and she's terrific, so I started shedding my old stereotypes. But I can't help but think in reading the fine print on analyses like the Hout Report that this is God's revenge for my mocking the sociology field.

A good friend of RD -- in fact, the one who married a sociologist -- sends us this link to Crooked Timber, a Kerry-sympathetic collective of bloggers. One of their crew, Kieran Healey, a sociologist from the University of Arizona, has some skepticism towards the Hout paper. Healey disputes any notion that all electronic voting touchscreen machines in Florida were the source of aberrations, pointing out that "Broward and Palm Beach counties (which have very large populations and lean strongly Democratic) swung much more toward Bush than was typical for counties where Republicans won less than 47 or 48 percent of the vote in 2000. It turns out that these two counties are driving the findings of Hout et al’s model." The question then is what's happening in those two counties.

Andrew Gelman, a Columbia statistician, also analyzes the Hout paper. Gelman's explanation: "One possibility, as suggested by Hout et al., is cheating, possibly set up ahead of time (e.g., by loading extra votes into the machines before the election or by setting it up to switch or not count some votes) … but an obvious alternative explanation is that, for various reasons, 3% more people in those counties preferred Bush in 2004, compared to 2000. As can be seen in the graphs above for 2000, 1996, and 1992, such a swing would be unusual (at least compared to recent history), but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen!… It would make sense to look further at Broward and Palm Beach counties, where swings happened which look unexpected compared to the other counties and compared to 2000, 1996, and 1992. But lots of unexpected things happen in elections, so we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that e-voting is related to these particular surprises." Well, fine, true: it's certainly possible that in two counties in all of Florida, there was a situation that didn't exist in any other counties in the state given the demographic makeup where the two counties, which used touchscreen voting, experienced an unexplained jump in their Bush votes. Sure, it's possible, just like it's possible to win a lottery, or, using better odds, a raffle of 1000 people. That's not reason enough to push away the questions of why this anomaly existed.

Healey takes Gelman's thoughts, and summarizes: "In other words, if there is cheating it’s not centralized cheating where all the e-voting machines mess up in the same way. If you believe that the machines were rigged, focus on the ones in Palm Beach and Broward county. But it seems more likely that these results show the Republican Party Machine was really, really well-organized in Palm Beach and Broward, and they were able to mobilize their vote better than the Democrats. The general swing toward Bush in Florida seems consistent with this story."

I'd disagree with Healey's last statement. Why would the Republican Party Machine be particularly strong and make a particularly successful showing -- particularly successful described as bucking the previous models in 1996 and 2000 -- in Palm Beach and Broward Counties, rather than in other counties (such as one's more hit by the Hurricanes and thus more likely to be sympathetic towards Bush?) I think Healey makes a jump here that I can't join him on.

But where I do agree with Healey -- and think he makes a good case for this in his blog -- is that rather than focusing on evidence of a widespread discrepancy in all of the Florida counties which used touchscreen technology, eyes should be trained on the aberration/problem in Broward and Palm Beach Counties.

And I'll never cast an eye down on sociology majors again. Forgive me. You are all beautiful, beautiful people. Some of you are maybe even hot.

GAO Congress letter signatories growing and growing

2004-11-23T09:39:00.000-08:00

It started with three: Conyers, Nadler, and Wexler.

Then Rush Holt (D-NJ), Melvin Watt (D-NC), and Bobby Scott (D-VA) signed on.

Then on November 17, two additional letters were sent calling for a General Accounting Office investigation of the November 2 irregularities and glitches.

First, a letter adding the signatures of Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Louise Slaughter (D-NY), and George Miller (D-CA), was sent, increasing the number of signatures to nine. Here's a pdf copy of the letter.

Then, that same day, a second letter --fourth letter overall--was sent to the GAO which added John Olver (D-MA), Bob Filner (D-CA), Gregory Meeks (D-NY), and Barbara Lee (D-CA). That made it 13.

Now, according to Buzzflash, another congressional representative, Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, has asked to become the 14th signatory to the letters to the GAO. That brings it to fourteen. Fourteen Democratic representatives from all over the country, black and white, male and female.

Whither the Democratic senators?

Move on not moving on...

2004-11-23T09:30:00.000-08:00

Salon -- one of the few mainstream publications to be actively covering the irregularities and recount activities -- has a piece describing Sunday's speakerphone-and-computer Move-On meet-in of more than 2 million activists built around a simple goal: "to identify issues the group should focus on and strategies it should deploy to "move on" from the defeat in November's election."

The house parties around the country voted that Move-On make election reform its chief priority in the months to come, with the war in Iraq coming in a close second. (200 house parties voting for election reform, Iraq getting the support of 170 of them.)

How about Hout?

2004-11-23T07:55:00.000-08:00

Olbermann rightly asks why the media hasn't been covering the Hout Report. He says that part of the reason is that the scholarly report from Berkeley, suggesting that Bush may have received up to 260,000 more votes in fifteen Florida counties than he should have due to touch-screen voting systems, is not receiving a ton of press in the mainstream media is just because it's a tough report to read. Hmm.

I can tell you this: I was at a wedding this weekend in NYC, and I was surprised that a prominent cable network political analyst in attendance there had not even heard about the Hout/Berkeley study. Not that he debunked. Not that he waved it aside. But that he did not even know that it existed. The exact same thing with a prominent weekly newsmagazine columnist who was also in attendance, and who had just gotten back from a trip out of the country. Smart guys. Old friends of the family. And when I asked them about the Berkeley Report on Florida, the response was little more than Blink Blink. (And yes, we just edited this paragraph a bit to bring it more into the anonymous, Guess Who/Don't Sue model.)

Olbermann in this post describes the press conference phonecall with Professor Hout. Keith explains that the Berkeley researchers have compensated for "all the bugaboos that hampered the usefulness of previous studies of the county voting results in Florida": "they’ve weighted the thing to allow for an individual county’s voting record in both the 2000 and 1996 elections (throwing out the ‘Dixiecrat’ effect), to wash out issues like the varying Hispanic populations, median income, voter turnout change, and the different numbers of people voting in each county."

The result? "When you calculate all that, you are forced to conclude that compared to the Florida counties that used paper ballots, the ones that used electronic voting machines were much more likely to show “excessive votes” for Mr. Bush, and that the statistical odds of this happening organically are less than one in 1,000."

They also say that these “excessives” occurred most prominently in counties where Senator Kerry beat the President most handily. In the Democratic bastion of Broward, where Kerry won by roughly 105,000, they suggest the touch-screens “gave” the President 72,000 more votes than statistical consistency should have allowed. In Miami-Dade (Kerry by 55,000) they saw 19,300 more votes for Bush than expected. In Palm Beach (Kerry by 115,000) they claim Bush got 50,000 more votes than possible.

Hout and his research team consistently insisted they were not alleging that voting was rigged, nor even that what they’ve found actually affected the direction of Florida’s 27 Electoral Votes. They point out that in a worst-case scenario, they see 260,000 “excessives” - and Bush took the state by 350,000 votes. But they insist that based on Florida’s voting patterns in 1996 and 2000, the margin cannot be explained by successful get-out-the-vote campaigns, or income variables, or anything but something rotten in the touch screens.

The Hout Report also says that they "ran a similar examination on the voting patterns in Ohio, comparing its paper ballot and electronic results, and found absolutely nothing to suggest either candidate got any “bump” that couldn’t otherwise be explained by past voting patterns, income, turnout, or any other commonplace factor." You'd think that the Hout Report would then be embraced by the media -- only to discourage any idea of funny business in Ohio. (Remember, though, that Ohio did not use touchscreen voting machines. Florida did.)

More...

2004-11-22T22:26:00.000-08:00

There's much more to catch up on -- especially sifting through the different analyses of the Berkeley Report (most of which seem to support its findings) -- but it'll have to wait until tomorrow, as I'm jetlagged and still on NYC time. Expect an increase in posting throughout the week. I've disabled the comments boxes because one particular lunatic kept posting hostile comments, but please make use of the email address on the right side.

Why a hand recount in Ohio helps John Kerry

2004-11-22T22:15:00.000-08:00

Olbermann's co-hort at MSNBC (though not necessarily his fellow traveler), David Shuster, has this interesting Hardblogger post about Ohio provisional ballots.

Shuster explains why a hand recount -- which will involve a visual examination of all 93,000 "spoiled ballots" that indicated "no" vote for President in machine tabulation -- might help John Kerry.... because the Matthew Fox anlaysis of counties reporting "spoiled ballots" revealed that 60 percent of all the spoiled ballots come from heavily Democratic urban areas.

That's good news for Kerry. But how much good news? Shuster:

Can the "provisional ballots" and "spoiled ballots" change the Ohio outcome? As it stands, the difference between President Bush and John Kerry is 136,483 votes. When John Kerry decided to concede, here is some of the math his campaign looked at:

If you assume, for the sake of argument, that Kerry receives 80 percent of the 130,000 provisional ballots most observers expect will be validated... Kerry would receive 104,000 votes and President Bush would get 26,000. That's a net gain for John Kerry of 78,000. At that point, the margin between President Bush and Senator Kerry would drop to 58,000 votes.

Now, let's assume a preference can be determined on all 93,000 spoiled ballots. And let's also assume John Kerry receives 80% and President Bush receives 20%. John Kerry would receive 74,400 votes and President Bush would receive 18,600 votes. That's another net gain for John Kerry of 55,800. However, that still leaves John Kerry 3,000 votes short. And remember, the theory that Kerry is going to receive 80% of all provisional and "spoiled" ballots is not realistic. As the Kerry campaign noted on November 3, "the votes are just not going to be there."

So Shuster's approximation -- generously assuming that Kerry gets 80% of the provisional ballots and 80% of the spoiled ballots -- still winds up with Kerry probably coming up short. Unless there did happen to be some kind of hacking going on the Windows systems that tabulated the county by county vote. Or if there were other glitches. Or if Warren County had some funny business going on. Either way, let the recount happen, so questions are answered once and for all.

Update: a RD reader writes: "yes Shuster says Kerrry would come up 3,000 votes short in his scenario - but then Shuster forgot to subtract the 3,800 extra votes Bush was awarded by a friendly touch-screen machine in Ohio - so that's Kerry by 800 - and we're in Floridian territory, where we, truth be told, probably belong." At first, this looked funny to me -- but it actually makes sense. If Shuster didn't factor in those 3,800 votes from that Franklin County glitch -- well, this would make Ohio damn close. Such that I'm going to make a new post of it!

What we talk about when we talk about Ohio

2004-11-22T20:45:00.000-08:00

Much to catch up on. First of all, Ohio: where to begin?

First off, Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell has started tallying up the provisional ballots. You'll remember that we have provisional ballots due to the Help America Vote Act that Congress passed seeking to ensure that, should people have their registrations muddled or muddied, they can fill out a provisional ballot that will be accepted upon further confirmation after Election Day. You'll also remember that John Kerry conceded on November 3 when it became increasingly clear how unlikely it would be for him to both a) have the vast majority of provisional ballots break his way and b) have the vast majority of provisional ballots be accepted, for him to then win the state. (This was, of course, before all of the talk of aberrations, irregularities, glitches, recounts, and other phenomena which not even most Republicans can adequately explain.)

More than a few of Rotten Denmark's conservative readers have pointed me to these results of how the Ohio provisional ballots have been tallied up. It might seem surprising that Worst President Ever won the majority of the provisional ballot votes in Ohio -- 76,631 (55.92%) to 59,710 (43.57%) for John Kerry. That's a total of 137,036. Conservative blog PoliPundit hails the results so far.

One problem: over here, in the county by county totals, it's clear that only a few counties have submitted/finished tabulating their provisional ballot totals. So, my little conservative reader friends, maybe you shouldn't cheer the provisional ballot results when Cuyahoga (read: Cleveland) hasn't even finished counting their provisionals yet. Thank you for playing. (Polipundit seems to not even stick by his hailing the results, but predicting that Bush is going to be doing even better when the provisionals are tabulated. Probably that huge Conservative upswell from Cleveland again.)

But the counting of provisional ballots has not been without problems. Such that, a lawsuit was filed against Ken Blackwell -- our pal, the Ohio Secretary of State.

That lawsuit was joined by the Ohio Democratic Party, and it's over the fact that the state "lacks clear rules for evaluating provisional ballots." The lawsuit asked U.S. District Judge Michael H. Watson to order Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell to impose uniform standards for counting provisional votes on all 88 counties. Democrats want the judge to take action quickly -- before the results of the election are certified December 1.

A revolutionary concept: uniform guidelines for a statewide recount procedure. As the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote on Thursday, "the Ohio Democratic Party has launched a federal court fight over nearly 155,000 provisional ballots by contending a proper accounting of those votes might decide who really won."

And what about the recount? Well, because Blackwell and company have been dragging their feet -- and because the Ohio deadline for provisional ballot count certification is December 6, and that gives only 7 days before the Electoral College meets to conduct a recount -- third party Presidential candidates Cobb and Badnarik's campaigns have now filed a lawsuit to expedite the recount as quickly as possible. (Here's the word from the Cobb campaign.)

But remember. The recount doesn't just involve the provisionals. It involves hanging chads and punch card ballots. Yes, our old friends from Florida days, and that special old friend, the undercount. Here's Olbermann:

As Kerry himself calculated early on November 3rd, the Provisional Ballots alone obviously could not provide anything close to enough bona fide Democratic votes to overcome President Bush’s 135,000 vote plurality in the Ohio election night tally. But as Howard also pointed out - and my colleague David Shuster so thoroughly extrapolated in a previous post on Hardblogger - the Provisionals plus the “Undercount” could make things very close indeed. The punch-card ballots “where it looks like nobody marked anything” when read by an optical scanning machine, might produce thousands of legitimate votes if hand-counted and judged by Ohio’s strict laws defining how many corners of the proverbial chads have to be detached to make a vote valid.

Now: the big question. Where are Kerry Edwards in all of this?

Well, more involved than it might first seem.

The KE campaign is doing a little semantic trapeze act, saying that they will participate in any Ohio recount -- but are clear to point out that they are not themselves making the request for a recount. Howard Fineman told Keith Olbermann that Team KE "keep saying these little things designed to make clear, at least to their supporters and the whole blogosphere out there, that they take the possibility (of a Kerry victory) and the need for a recount seriously.” The lead Kerry lawyer on the ground in Ohio explained that "the Kerry/Edwards campaign will be putting witnesses in the Boards of Elections if a recount is asked for… We are not requesting a recount.”

However. Here's where it gets interesting.

The Kerry Edwards website now has a contribution form to the Kerry Edwards General Election Legal and Accounting Compliance Fund. "Contributing to the Kerry-Edwards 2004 General Election Legal and Accounting Compliance Fund (GELAC) provides important support for our campaign. The Federal Election Commission has just granted our request to raise funds now to cover recount expenses. Your contribution to Kerry-Edwards 2004 GELAC will provide the resources to make sure we are prepared to win the post election day battles."

Yep. They're raising funds for recounts.

You gotta say this: Olbermann is right, that "even the mainstream media is beginning to sit up and take notice that, whatever its merits, the investigation into the voting irregularities of November 2nd has moved from the Reynolds Wrap Hat stage into legal and governmental action." The Ohio Republicans seem to be left now to try to claim that the recount would cost a million dollars, and thus is a "frivolous" lawsuit.

Well, given the clear lack of confidence Americans are expressing in the integrity of the voting process, not having the recount might cost everyone -- including President Bush -- a hell of a lot more.

Huge NY Times headline!

2004-11-22T18:52:00.000-08:00

Winner Is Declared... and Opposition Declares Fraud

Sorry, it's in Kiev.

But first...

2004-11-22T03:21:00.000-08:00

“Regardless of the outcome of this election, once all the votes are counted— and they will be counted— we will continue to challenge this administration. I will fight for a national standard for federal elections that has both transparency and accountability in our voting system. It is unacceptable in the United States that people still don’t have full confidence in the integrity of the voting process.”

That was John Kerry's email to supporters, sent on Friday.

It's getting interesting.

More on this later today.

Right back at you

2004-11-22T03:02:00.000-08:00

We're typing to you from the wi-fi connection at JFK. Our internet access was limited this past weekend by both wireless incapabilities and wedding celebrations. We'll be back at home by the afternoon, though our posting may be inhibited due to my having a deadline for a work project due Tuesday. We've missed you, too.

So where are the strong? And who are the trusted?

2004-11-19T01:18:00.000-08:00

Thursday was the first full day that I had a counter installed on this website. Close to 10,000 hits in one day, close to 6,000 unique visitors. Not bad for a weblog begun less than 14 days ago. Thank you for coming to this site; more importantly, thank you for leaving this site and taking with you information to share, pass on, and spread to others.

Spreading the word is essential -- I ran into a friend tonight at the Wilco concert who was following politics like a crazy man these last few months. Yet he had absolutely no idea that a recount was going on in Ohio, and hadn't heard about the Berkeley report. Looking through the most prominent blogs and newspapers, I don't blame him. How would he have known?

There's no piece yet in the New York Times about the Hout report. Google News shows that the report has received coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, while Newsday, Boston Herald (which both ran the AP story), the News and Observer of NC, and the San Francisco Examiner carried the AP story. This is a start. This is not enough.

The leading survey center of the country's top public university just released a report saying that the President probably received at least 130,000 excess votes in Florida. Let me put it this way: 130,000 is 3% of 3,500,000, the approximate entire popular vote margin by which Bush beat Kerry. And that's what this report says is the minimum number of excess votes.

Meanwhile, there is still no explanation for the irregularities in Ohio. But there will be a recount.

In the meantime, if you want a good laugh, then please, read this. "How Ohio pulled it off," indeed. We are fans here, of course, of Mr. Shakespeare, and we think that Mr. Blackwell's op-ed piece smacks of "me think the lady doth protest too much."

Posting will be spotty this weekend, all depending on my wi-fi access in New York. I'll be back from NYC by early Monday. We will hopefully have more news about New Hampshire and Ohio -- and more coverage about the Berkeley/Hout report.

Have a great weekend, everyone. Continue to spread the word.

Tonight, at the Wilco show at the Wiltern Theater here in Los Angeles, a highlight was when the band played "California Stars," a favorite song of mine, one that would make a fine wedding song. The music was written by Wilco and Billy Bragg, but the lyrics were written by Woody Guthrie, and never put to music until the Mermaid Avenue album of a few years back.

As the band played the song, I remembered how Woody Guthrie, of course, used to play an acoustic guitar which had, painted on the side, This Machine Kills Fascists.

And so, I like to think, can this machine, too.

A call to action

2004-11-18T13:24:00.000-08:00

1. John Kerry should make a public statement. Not David Wade. Not Stephanie Cutter. Not Tad Devine. John Kerry. It should be simple. It should just be, "We are committed to every vote being counted in this election." That is very different than the "It's time to move on from the election results" line that Donna Brazille etc. are taking.

It's fine to leave everything else to surrogates. I understand why that has to be. Let other people say that concession speeches are political speeches, not legal statements. Let others point out and itinerize the list of troubling developments in Ohio, Florida, and elsewhere.

But John Kerry should make a statement that he is committed to making sure that every vote was counted. Everywhere. And that he is troubled -- no, concerned, concerned is better -- concerned by reports that not every vote has been counted. Period. Done. Thank you.

It would be a tacit statement of support for the Ohio and New Hampshire recount efforts, for the exploration of what the Hout Report means; and for all the people who voted for John Kerry -- or, for that matter, George W. Bush -- to have the confidence in the security and sanctity of the election of November 2.

2. 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.

But -- as we've seen with RatherGate, as we've seen with the Trent Lott story -- the blogosphere can perform an important function here. Important function? Essential function.

Especially the big boys.

So Mickey.

Andrew.

Josh.

Atrios.

Kos.

Get to it.

Call attention to the Berkeley SRC report. Even the fact that it's out there and online and available to be read is big information to pass on.

If you print it, no doubt, the others will follow.

If you build it, they will come.

God willing.

Update: Salon has posted on the Hout Report in their War Room column. No registration required, but you have to sit through a brief advertisment.

It’s not proof of voter fraud -- at least not yet -- but it seems that somebody has some explaining to do about the election results from Florida. In a report released this morning, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, say that George W. Bush received 130,000 more votes in Florida in 2004 than he should have received, and that the only real explanation has something to do with electronic voting machines.

Through multiple-regression analysis, the Berkeley researchers examined the increase in Bush’s support, on a county-by-county basis, between 2000 and 2004. Their conclusion: A county’s use of electronic voting machines resulted in a "disproportionate increase" in votes for Bush which "cannot be explained away by other factors."

The disparity between the votes Bush received and the votes statistical models said he should have received was largest in those e-voting counties where Al Gore was strongest in 2000: Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade Michael Hout, the Berkeley sociology professor who presented the researchers' findings today, said that he could not explain why the disparity was so high in counties that favored Gore in 2000, nor could he explain how the electronic voting machines might have over-counted Bush votes. But he said that there’s virtually no possibility -- a one in 1,000 chance that he called "trivial" -- that the voting disparities arose by chance.

"Our approach is like a smoke alarm, and it’s beeping," Hout said on a call with reporters this morning. "We're calling on officials in Florida to investigate to see if there's a fire."

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.

BREAKING NEWS: Hout/Berkeley Report Available Online!

2004-11-18T11:14:00.000-08:00

Here it is! Scroll down to under "voting," entitled, "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."

I haven't read it in detail yet, but it's clear: this is not about Dixiecrats. The summary highlights the following:

- 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.

Like I've seen saying from the beginning: forget about the Panhandle. The real vat of cat urine is the situation in South Florida.

I'm going to withhold further comment until I've had a chance to read the report. But make no mistake: this is very big.

New Mexico vote completed, Bush still on top

2004-11-18T11:01:00.000-08:00

Rodger Payne forwards us the following news from New Mexico. Results won't be certified until Tuesday, with President Bush still the winner... with a margin of 6,047 votes according to Tuesday's Associated Press tally. The President's lead thus narrowed considerably with the counting of the provisional ballots, yet not close enough for hopeful Dems. (Those 5 electoral votes wouldn't have turned over the election. But they certainly would have made Bill Richardson do a little jig in the middle of Santa Fe.)

And there were some smaller turnovers: in Dona Ana County, where Bush was the Election Day leader, Kerry edged out the president in the final count with 51 percent of the vote.)

Press conference...

2004-11-18T10:54:00.000-08:00

We're waiting to hear from anyone who participated in the press conference this morning (10 AM PST) about the Survey Research Center's potentially explosive report about Florida.

If a reader has any information about Professor Hout's study, please email me at the email address listed on the right.

All this and

2004-11-18T09:31:00.000-08:00

Wilco concert tonight!

My city was gone

2004-11-18T09:04:00.000-08:00

Keith also passes on this very curious story from the Dayton Daily News. You have to register to read the piece, but register I did, so you won't have to.

Two precincts had high undercounts, analysis shows
By Ken McCall and Jim Bebbington

DAYTON | Two Montgomery County precincts had extraordinarily high numbers of ballots cast Nov. 2 with no presidential vote counted, and the county's overall rates of such undercounts were highest where Democratic hopeful John Kerry did best.

Undercounts are ballots that do not register a vote for a particular race, in this case for president. Two precincts — one in Kettering and another in Washington Twp. — had undercounts of more than 25 percent, according to a Dayton Daily News analysis of the county's unofficial results.

Overall in Montgomery County, 5,693 or 2 percent of the ballots cast registered no valid vote for president.

As predicted by political scientists, who say the poor and less-educated are more likely to have problems with punch card voting, the rate of so-called undercounted presidential ballots was higher in Democratic areas of the county than in Republican strongholds.

The undercount amounted to 2.8 percent of the ballots in the 231 precincts that supported Kerry, but only 1.6 percent of those cast in the 354 precincts that supported President Bush.

Across the state on Nov. 2, counties that used punch-card voting, as Montgomery County did, had a higher rate of undercounted ballots than counties that used optical scanning technology or electronic voting machines, which had the lowest undercount.

With punch cards, undercounts can occur when a voter:

•Inadvertently votes for two candidates in the same race.

•Decides not to vote in the race.

•Does not sufficiently puncture the punch card to eliminate a "hanging chad." Hanging chads can make it impossible for machines to read the punch cards.

The highest undercount rate in Montgomery County was in precinct Washington X, around Paragon Road and Spring Valley Pike in Washington Twp.

In the precinct, 168 or 27.5 percent of the 611 ballots cast did not have a good presidential vote. That was followed closely by Kettering 3-A, near Stroop Road and Far Hills Avenue, where 121 or 27.3 percent of the 444 ballots cast were undercounted.

Both of those precincts supported Bush, as did seven of the 10 precincts with the highest rate of undercounted presidential ballots. That's despite the county's overall trend, in which precincts where Kerry did well tended to have above-average undercounts, while precincts where Bush won had lower-than-average undercounts.

County elections officials said they have no reports of any problems at either Washington X or Kettering 3-A. The punch-card voting stands, checked Wednesday using demonstration ballots, appeared to work appropriately.

The presiding judge of Washington X, Shirley Wightman, a 40-year veteran of working polling places, said voters in her precinct encountered no problems.

"We checked the machines periodically and I could see nothing wrong with them," she said.

Wightman said turnout was high that day and there were 16 provisional voters at the precinct, a higher-than-normal number. But those provisionals do not account for the under-votes and won't be tabulated until next Monday, after officials confirm the registration of those voters.

One voter reported having trouble pushing her ballot into the slot in the voting machine, but she had not pushed the card in far enough and a poll worker helped her, Wightman said.

"Other than that things went pretty smooth," she said.

Two Washington X voters said they checked for hanging chads on their ballots before turning them in and found none.

"I personally checked mine and it punched the number I wanted," said Heather Baarlaer of Washington Twp.

Rates that high show something must have gone wrong, said Larry J. Sabato, a political scientist from the University of Virginia. Undercounts during presidential elections are typically between 1 percent and 2 percent, he said.

"It is very difficult to believe that a quarter of the people would not vote for president, especially in a year like this," Sabato said. "If I were the election officers in those areas I would be doing some very extensive checks of those machines."

Moraine had the highest presidential undercount of all the county's jurisdictions: 5.6 percent of the 2,557 votes cast in the city's seven precincts had no valid presidential vote. It was followed by Germantown with 3.6 percent undercount, Trotwood with 3.1 percent and Dayton with 2.8 percent. Both Moraine and Germantown supported Bush, with margins of 2 percent and 34 percent respectively, while Trotwood and Dayton went heavily for Kerry by margins of 60 percent and 45 percent.

Back to Keith: "What happened in the voting precincts in Moraine, Ohio? 2,557 votes were cast at seven sites there. The President won the city by 2%. The number of ballots without a valid presidential vote was 5.6%.

"What do the state undercounts in Ohio look like? Did they reduce Bush’s margin of victory? Did they eliminate votes for Kerry? What the hell happened?

The least likely explanations are that these people couldn’t make up their minds, or screwed up only the presidential part of their ballots."

And:

"As the Ohio recount nears, the number of hotspots continues to multiply. You are aware of the remarkable late night voting lines throughout the state, and the mysterious Glitch of Youngstown which initially registered negative 25,000,000 votes. There is the Gahanna machine which gave one presidential candidate 4,000 extra votes in a community of 600. And the farcical “walling off” of the vote counting in Warren County, because the county head of security was told face-to-face of an FBI terrorism warning there - except the FBI says it didn’t issue any terrorism warnings there.

The Associated Press today carries a report of 2,600 ballots in nine precincts around Sandusky, Ohio that were counted twice— as that paper puts it— “likely because of worker error.” The Clyde precinct showed a voter turnout of 131%, to the dismay of the head of the elections board, Barb Tuckerman. Ms. Tuckerman, in one of the great quotes of the election, told the News-Messenger of Fremont, Ohio: “I knew there was something amiss.”

Through Sather Gate, turn right at the Campanile

2004-11-18T08:58:00.000-08:00

Olbermann reports on Berkeley press release.

Keith is skeptical -- from the limited-info press release, he seems to worry that the Berkeley group is treading out onto the "optical scanning vs. other voting methods" in Florida stretch, which had already been explained/debunked by the historical voting patterns in Florida's Dixiecrat counties of the Panhandle.

But I think that the Berkeley guys have been studying voting technologies all year long. I'd be stunned if they had not taken into account voting patterns in 2000 and 1996.

Keep in mind that Olbermann -- nor your little Hamlet -- has yet seen the Hout Report. We're all just going based on the press release.

But what a press release!

Keith: "This is now shaping up as the BCS of presidential election analysis. A joint report out of the CalTech and MIT voting project— suggesting that the much-decried exit polling of election night really wasn’t outside the margin of error at all when analyzed on a state-by-state basis— had already been countered by a Penn professor’s report using the exit polling for Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Now it’s not just CalTech and MIT versus Penn— but also UC Berkeley versus CalTech and MIT."

ROLL... ON....YOU...BEARS!

Update: A crackerjack reader offers this: "Hout's a member of the National Academy of Sciences... he's not going to forget to control for the Dixiecrat effect, is he?" My hunch: no!

NH/Ohio/Florida: Where to begin? Good day sunshine!

2004-11-18T07:03:00.000-08:00

The big news, of course, is this. But some other goodies/developments:

Vote Recount to Settle Doubts? by Kim Zetter of Wired News - everything you wanted to know about the New Hampshire recount. Plus more that you didn't necessarily want to know, but will gladly skim!

Wait, maybe this is the big news. From the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

"Seeming to brush aside John Kerry's concession speech, the Ohio Democratic Party has launched a federal court fight over nearly 155,000 provisional ballots by contending a proper accounting of those votes might decide who really won... County officials across the state began tabulating provisional ballots Friday. "Given the closeness of the presidential and other elections," Ohio's provisional ballots "may prove determinative of the outcome," Democrats argue in a legal filing made public Wednesday by the U.S. District Court.

The lawsuit asked U.S. District Judge Michael H. Watson to order Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell to impose uniform standards for counting provisional votes on all 88 counties. Democrats want the judge to take action quickly - before the results of the election are certified.

Watson, who was appointed by Bush, has not set a hearing. Don McTigue, a Columbus lawyer who filed the lawsuit for the Ohio Democratic Party, said the Democrats have concerns that different standards are being applied from county to county.

"Our action is not tied to some hope of changing the outcome of the election. We're being consistent with the Kerry campaign, and the Democratic Party's interest in seeing all eligible ballots are counted," McTigue said.

Carlo LoParo, a spokesman for Blackwell, defended Ohio's rules for handling provisional ballots as explicit. He said Blackwell, a Republican, is adamant that every valid vote will be counted.

In court papers, the Democrats cite Bush v. Gore - the Supreme Court ruling after Florida's contested election that awarded Bush the White House in 2000 - as a legal precedent for the Ohio lawsuit. That case was decided by a majority of five justices.

"In Bush v. Gore, the United States Supreme Court held that the failure to provide specific standards for counting of ballots that are sufficient to assure a uniform count statewide violates the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution," their court filing said.

In Ohio, Democrats argue, the state lacks clear statewide rules that guarantee provisional ballots are processed consistently from county to county.

First we have Nader pushing for recounts to Democrats' potential benefit, and now we have Democrats citing Bush v. Gore as precedent. Let's buy our irony in bulk!

And, finally, things seem to be percolating in Volusia County in Florida, where Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org fame might be on the verge of having evidence of fraud. Maybe. ""We began to compare the special printouts given to us with the signed polling tapes from election night. Lo and behold, some were missing. We also found some that didn't match. In fact, in one location, precinct 215, an African-American precinct, the votes were off by hundreds, in favor of George W. Bush and other Republicans. Hmm. Which was right? Our polling tape, specially printed on Nov. 15, without signatures, or theirs, printed on Nov. 2, with up to 8 signatures per tape?" I linked to DailyKos' story about it, because the comments box is truly beautiful. "This COULD BE IT!!!" etc.

BREAKING: Bush Got 130,000 Excess Votes in Florida, Evoting System Challenged, says UC Berkeley Study

2004-11-17T22:27:00.000-08:00

This press release was just forwarded to Denmark from a friend in the Venetian Provinces...

Hello,

This is an invitation to a press conference taking place tomorrow, 11/18 at 10am PST/1pm EST about a UC Berkeley report that’s challenging e-voting in Florida.

Here’s the story: A research team at UC Berkeley will report that irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods. This is the first time that an academic institution has formally challenged the e-voting system, and the University is calling on local voting officials in Florida to investigate. The research team – which comprises some of the top minds in voter research – will disclose full results of the study and the raw data at the press conference tomorrow.

Details about the press conference are included below. It will take place on the UC Berkeley campus, but you can participate via a dial-in number – please let me know if you are interested and I can provide you with that information.

*** MEDIA ALERT ***

UC BERKELEY STUDY QUESTIONS

FLORIDA E-VOTE COUNT

RESEARCH TEAM CALLS FOR IMMEDIATE INVESTIGATION

When: Thursday, November 18, 2004, 10:00 am Pacific

Where: UC Berkeley campus, Survey Research Center Conference Room—2538 Channing Way (intersection of Channing/Bowditch). Parking on Durant near Telegraph.

What: A research team at UC Berkeley will report that irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods. Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance – the probability is less than 0.1 percent. The research team, led by Professor Michael Hout, will formally disclose results of the study at the press conference.

To attend the conference or request dial-in information, contact:

Erin Reasoner
Eastwick Communications
650-480-4031

Erica Pereira
Eastwick Communications
640-480-4024

Noel Gallagher
UC Berkeley Media Relations
510-643-7944

I have no other details yet.

But this could be -- well, big. You can read about the Survey Research Center here. It looks like they've been studying and comparing voting technologies a bit this year: "In response to national concerns about voting systems, the Survey Research Center and the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley have worked together to determine which voting systems do the best job of recording and tabulating votes. The survey compares five voting systems: direct record electronic (DRE), lever machine, optical scan, paper ballot, and punchcard." (This is NOT the survey that's being released tomorrow, but instead another recent one dealing with similar interests.)

A study from, bar none, the finest public insitution of higher learning in the country, by people who have been studying voting technologies, displaying a large discrepancy between counties with electronic voting and those without.

This is big, big stuff. Godzilla big.

A reminder: in the most recent tallies, Bush won Florida by less than 400,000 votes.

The presence on the email press release of a contact number for Berkeley's media relations guy makes it clear: this is not some hobby or side project by someone who happens to be a professor. This is a University sanctioned study by people whose training lies in such surveys and subject matter.

Did we mention earlier that the Electoral College isn't meeting until December 13?

Saving my ass disclaimer: If this is a hoax, I'm going into Lou Ferrigno mode. But I believe it's for real.

Update: It's also here and here. No hoax!

More debunking of Exit Polls

2004-11-17T22:15:00.000-08:00

Here, courtesy of Herr Kaus, is a Mayflower Hill blog post including an interview with exit pollster Warren Mitofsky, where Mitofsky himself shrugs off the suggestions that exit poll disparities point towards irregularities.

One thing he confirmed to me is that the average deviation to Kerry in the completed version of the exit poll was +1.9%. This figure was arrived at by comparing and averaging, on a precinct to precinct level, the exit poll data and the precinct vote returns. When asked if the full 1.9% deviation could be explained by non-response bias (Kerry voters being more likely to complete the exit poll than Bush voters), he said, "It's my opinion, but I can't prove it." He went on to say that it would be an impossible thing to "prove" categorically because there exist an infinite number of variables that could have a micro-impact on the exit poll which could combine for a statistically significant impact. These factors ranged from the weather to the distance from the polling place some of his poll takers were forced to stand. He is also trying to determine whether there is a statistically significant correlation between certain types of precincts and the non-response deviation. Again, right now he feels the most reasonable and logical explanation of the average 1.9% deviation for Kerry was non-response bias.

One possibility he was able to rule out, though, is touch screen voting machines that don't leave any paper trail being used to defraud the election. To prove this, he broke down precincts based on the type of voting machine that was used and compared the voting returns from those precincts with his own exit polls. None of the precincts with touch screen computers that don't leave paper trails, or any other type of machine for that matter, had vote returns that deviated from his exit poll numbers once the average 1.9% non-response bias was taken into account.

...The data that was reported on election day had not been "weighted" for turnout yet. Once an accurate projection of overall voter turnout is made, the raw data that the exit pollsters collect is plugged into a complicated methodological system that I won't begin to pretend to understand. The point is, though, that a sort of "correction" is made to the raw numbers that everyone saw on Wonkette and other sites. The bloggers who ran those numbers either didn't know about the system of "weighting" the exit polling data, or didn't bother to point it out.

As Mickey points out, this is the exit pollsters method of saving their asses: hey, them numbers weren't corrected yet! Serves you bloggers right for posting them before we cooked 'em up with all the dressings.

Where to find up to date election results?

2004-11-17T17:53:00.000-08:00

Question: where can I find up to date state by state (and perhaps county by county) popular vote tallies, that reflect the absentees and provisionals? The New York Times' tallies were last updated on November 9. CNN's were last updated before that. Feel free to email me in the address listed to the right, or submit to the comments box. Thanks!

It takes a Nation of millions to hold us back

2004-11-17T17:22:00.000-08:00

Russ Baker writes in the Nation on the need for a New Hampshire recount. And he provides the account for how exactly the push for a New Hampshire recount began -- and how Ralph Nader took up the cause.

Tomorrow the first recount begins--in New Hampshire, of all places, a state George Bush didn't even win. But in those areas where he did well, sometimes the numbers look decidedly odd. In this case, the person who got the ball rolling was one Ida Briggs, a longtime Michigan software designer and database developer who did a statistical analysis of some election results, and found them perplexing enough to trigger concerns in her mind about the efficacy of the electronic vote tabulation system used.

What she found were striking anomalies--mostly in precincts using paper ballots that were then input via the optical scanning machines manufactured by the controversial vendor Diebold, of North Canton, Ohio. In general, according to Briggs, the "Diebold precincts" showed larger and more frequent deviations from expected voting trends than precincts relying strictly on hand counts, and even than those using an optical-scan counting system from another manufacturer. Creating trend patterns by looking at the 2000 and 2004 elections, she found rural, typically conservative precincts that hand-counted ballots as voting more for Kerry than they did for Gore, while larger, urban precincts using Diebold's AccuVote machines often did the opposite. Of the precincts where Kerry did less well than expected, according to Briggs, 73 percent used optical-scan technology and 62 percent used Diebold machines. Fully 92 percent of all out-of-trend votes were optically scanned. New Hampshire has 301 precincts; 126 of them use Diebold's AccuVote technology.

...Briggs became interested in the numbers when, shortly after the election, she saw a study published on the web about statistical anomalies in nonswing states. New Hampshire caught her attention because of the sizable--15 percent--differential between early exit polls and results. It was easy to study, because the state made its data available online. And because New Hampshire was a state Kerry won, no one could claim that the goal of a recount there was to change the election results.

Once Briggs's eyebrows were raised, she said, she tried contacting the Kerry campaign to see if officials there would call for a recount. With no affirmative response, on Friday, November 5, she called Ralph Nader--with less than four hours remaining before New Hampshire's deadline for recount requests. The Nader people didn't know Briggs, and were wary, but Air America Radio host Randi Rhodes managed to mobilize enough listeners that Nader soon had a twelve-inch stack of imploring faxes. With one minute remaining to deadline, he faxed in a request for a recount. (He also agreed to pay a $2,000 filing fee plus actual costs.)

On Thursday, New Hampshire officials will begin a hand recount of paper ballots in five of eleven large urban precincts--in Manchester and Litchfield--where Bush did surprisingly well. The remaining precincts will be counted soon. If the results prove interesting, recounts could be requested elsewhere besides Ohio, where such a request has already been made by Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb and Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik.

Even a hand recount won't satisfy everyone--and shouldn't. The efficacy of the American voting system is dependent on a lot of things going right--and anecdotal evidence suggests many fruitful avenues of inquiry into things that may have gone wrong... A recount, even if it does establish problems, likely won't change the winner in New Hampshire, and even if it does it will certainly not alter the outcome of the presidential race.... However, if it does show significant inaccuracies generated by the AccuVote equipment and software, it could trigger recounts elsewhere--recounts that could, theoretically, reverse the election.

That's highly unlikely, given Bush's hefty wins in key states, and given the prominent role of other voting technologies. But hand recounts of optically scanned ballots will go a long way toward addressing doubts about that technology and about the vendor. And it will perhaps give others the confidence to request recounts when results go against statistical trends, or common wisdom. At minimum, it will be a start on the road to transparency and accountability.

If it turns out that anomalies are just that, so be it. Then we need to spend more time understanding why people voted--really, truly voted--the way they did.

Swing dancing

2004-11-17T16:35:00.000-08:00

University of Louisville professor Rodger Payne has recently compiled some interesting facts about the election -- affirming that, for all the talk of "broad nationwide mandates," this was an incredibly close electoral election... and could have been even closer. And that so much of Bush's big margin of votes against Kerry -- and improvement over Bush's performance in 2000 -- came from states that weren't being contested... both red and blue.

"If John Kerry had won 13,300 more votes in Iowa, 11,000 additional votes in New Mexico and 21,600 more votes in Nevada (a total of fewer than 46,000 votes), then the Electoral College would have turned out 269-269.... In percentage terms, Ohio was about as close as these three states, but the vote margin was 137,000 (to date, those provisional ballots still aren't tabulated)."

"Obviously, Kerry also narrowly won a couple of states. New Hampshire and Wisconsin were won by a total of just over 20,000 votes. Add those to Bush's column and he gets to 300 electoral votes. Pennsylvania and Michigan were about as close as Ohio."

"Bush's percent of the vote went down from 2000 to 2004 in only Vermont and Virginia. The latter must be a good sign for Democrats for 2008 and beyond. Again, there are underlying demographic shifts at work that help explain this outcome."

But here's the really interesting stuff: Rodger has figured out that Bush won "a hell of a lot more votes in 2004 in states that were not at all contested. I could have added Tennessee, where Bush added another 280,000 votes to his margin and Oklahoma, for another 200,000." Rodger explains it in detail, but Bush's improved victory margins from 2000 in seven uncontested states -- New York, New Jersey, Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Indiana, and Connecticut (true, there were times that New Jersey was almost a swing state) -- accounted for half of Bush's 3.6 million margin over Kerry. These are states that weren't swarmed and inundated with political ads.

Most of the highly contested swing states didn't move much in Bush's direction, with one exception: Florida. There, Bush improved his margin by 400,000 votes over 2000.

In the states Kerry seriously contested, the country had a very close election. That is why I began above with the points about the really close swing states. The closest elections occurred in Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Wisconsin, as well as the big three of Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. These were 8 of the 9 states Kerry spent most of his time and money and he very nearly won the election. Florida was the 9th state and the only swing state featuring a big move toward Bush.

Where Kerry did not campaign, the President racked up huge vote margins. I've now listed 10 states with significant Bush movement and found 2.6 million of his 3.6 million victory margin in the popular vote.

Remove the 5 states that were virtually tied and that means the other 35 states explain only 1 million of the 3.6 million margin of victory for the President.

Thus, it looks like incumbency was worth a point or two in virtually every state in 2004 and Kerry's strategic decision not to campaign across the country likely depressed his potential vote total all over the map. Votes in large areas of the country were simply not in play, meaning that residents of those states had four years of Bush to weigh against the relatively unknown Kerry.

Move fewer than 200,000 votes and Kerry would have won the Electoral College 289-249, despite losing the popular vote by perhaps 3.4 million votes.

This is one of the more interesting analyses of the election results that I've read. And if that isn't a winning argument against the electoral college system -- and yes, as a Kerry voter, I know, I know, I should be rooting for the electoral college -- I don't know what is.

NY Observer to Kerry: GET OFF YOUR ASS

2004-11-17T15:27:00.000-08:00

Well, now we've made it to the beautiful pink newsprint of the New York Observer. If only this blog were not anonymous; as we're coming to New York this weekend for a wedding, we could maybe have parlayed the Ron Rosenbaum namedrop into better dinner reservations. (Though rest assured, Claudius' stepson also enjoys his fair share of Steak and Shake when driving through Bloomington.) We thank Ron for the hype, which we guarantee will only further encourage us to post, thus distracting us from our day job and a Tuesday deadline.

For the record, unlike Rosenbaum, your liege Hamlet forgives Kerry's decision to concede given what information Kerry had at the time. The Kerry Edwards team looked at the number of provisional ballots outstanding, and they looked at the number of votes Bush was ahead. Kerry would have had to have won more than 90% of the provisional ballots, and the provisional ballots would have to have all been accepted. This was possible, but unlikely. Very, very unlikely. (The large number of stories about irregularities, the Warren County lockdown, the Franklin County glitch -- none of that had emerged by midday Wednesday.)

I think that, had the stories of irregularities emerged earlier, the concession would have been put on hold, the same way it was held off until Wednesday to assess the numbers. I also know from inside sources, cough cough, that if the recount in Ohio turns anything up, that concession could easily be retracted. (It ain't legally binding, folks. Just imagine the speech: "Knowing now what we did not know then," but with some more awesome Shrumanian pizzaz about mountaintops and sunrises. Yes, I admit, some days, these are the daydreams that get me up in the morning to blog to you from two 50 watt towers in the middle of the Mojave.)

Once you get past Rosenbaum's anti-Kerry bile (there's a couple of milkbuckets' worth), he makes good points, and is, after all, bringing it into a publication with a very different readership than Truthout or DemocracyNow. Rosenbaum is bringing the message to the Conde Nast set, as well as the people who keep writing checks to let Mark Green run for various offices. Yes, not mainstream America; but yet, people who have key hands in mainstream media. A little different from the Counterpunch/Pacifica crew.

I know—you don’t have to tell me—that most of the wildest C.I.A./Diebold/Rove/Master Hacker conspiracy theories of this election have been debunked, as has much of the alleged "evidence" on which they’re based. Farhad Manjoo, a Kerry partisan, did an important service in his Salon piece on Nov. 10, in which he cast doubt on some of the more paranoid theories, as have others on the "reality-based" left. But not all doubts have been resolved, certainly not in Ohio, where the provisional votes haven’t even been counted as I write this, where the Libertarian and the Green parties may succeed in getting the entire vote recounted—and in places beyond Ohio as well. (For what Slate’s Mickey Kaus calls "a non-crazy" voting-irregularity Web site, go to www.rottendenmark.blogspot.com).

I want to separate what I’m talking about here (mainly Mr. Kerry’s cave-in on Ohio) from fringe Internet conspiracy theories. What I am saying is that Mr. Kerry’s craven failure that morning to call for a scrupulous count in Ohio—which decided the election regardless of Bush’s popular-vote margin—was a stupid, paranoia-generating move.

In Ohio, where a switch of some 68,000 votes could have changed the name of the next President, the count deserved maximum scrutiny. Especially when the combination of allegedly "spoiled" invalid ballots (93,000) and the number of "provisional" ballots (155,000)—whose examination and tallying is still underway as I write—could have made a substantial dent in the 135,000-vote Bush margin. I think it’s unlikely it would have changed the result but, when we’re told the entire American polity is about to undergo a tectonic shift because of a margin that small, we ought to know exactly what that margin was. And if that means recounts and litigation, so be it.

Mr. Kerry’s failure to aggressively pursue the counting and recounting at the outset—that morning, when the evidence was fresh on the ground—has made it virtually impossible to know the vote with the exactitude we deserve. Especially if the Democratic Party is going to change its principles on the basis of 68,000 votes in Ohio. If we’re going to accede to discarding the constitutional separation of church and state, I’d like to know the exact count that mandates it, please.

Harsh on Kerry? Maybe just a wee bit, hmm? But he's holding Kerry's feet to the fire, as well he should. The more outrage over Ohio, the more likely that Kerry will step back in, and say not so fast, if the provisional ballot count cuts the margin severely down or the Glibs' recount starts to raise some suspicious eyebrows.

Rosenbaum mentions MSNBC's coverage, the On the Media piece, the NY Times editorial. All calling for a scrupulous count in Ohio. "No, it’s not Florida 2000 close in Ohio, but it’s close. And in the light of reports of some irregularities and malfunctions already exposed there, don’t we all deserve—both Bush and Kerry supporters—a respite from the allegations of an illegitimate Presidency that are now sweeping through cyberspace? For the sake of history, for the sake of maximum clarity and rationality in our political culture, we deserve the most exacting count possible, even if that means (horror of horrors) litigation." Here, here!

This graph made me smile. Rosenbaum ain't holding back:

On Mr. Olbermann’s MSNBC show, he asked Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter why reporters haven’t been looking into the reality on the ground in Ohio. Mr. Alter said, in effect, that he thought reporters preferred the outcome to be decisive that morning so they wouldn’t have to cancel their post-election vacation plans. Another great moment in journalism! (Mr. Alter added that he thought when they came back from vacation, "you’ll see" reporters looking more closely into the situation.) Then the Times editorial debunked the paper’s own earlier tendentious debunking (the one that branded just about all election complaints as "conspiracy theories").

Rosenbaum then mentions the Daily Kos' prediction that if "the provisional votes narrow the gap to a point where fraud could’ve cost us the election (say 30,000 votes) the Democrats and Kerry will fight."

I'll echo that. 30,000 is very different from 130,000. I have not talked explicitly about this with My Big Campaign Connection for a week, but I would think that if the provisional ballots make this big an impact -- you might see more than just tacit, quiet support from the Kerry crew for the Greens and Libs-lead recount in Ohio.

And yes, rather than yielding to the inevitable, I think having Kerry go back to work on the Hill is part of the same strategy that Rosenbaum quotes me as offering -- "The anonymous rottendenmark blogger suggested that [quietly sending Kerry lawyers to Ohio on fact-finding mission] was a smart strategy: play it low-key, as if they weren’t there to contest the result, but if something turned up" -- as it allows Kerry to play it safe. This is not the ramshackle Gore '00 strategy that James Baker surmounted the way Godzilla surmounts a croquet hoop. Kerry plays like nothing's wrong at all now, it means he doesn't look like a whiney sore loser if and when shit goes down in Winesburg Country.

Rosenbaum ends with this: "After the nightmare of Florida and the destabilizing effect it had on the polity, we all deserve a fair and exact count, and Mr. Kerry should be out front fighting for it. Didn’t he run as the bemedaled hero unafraid to fight the Viet Cong and Al Qaeda? Should he really be afraid of Ohio? Turn that Swift boat back to shore, John. You’ve stranded your supporters."

Wait and see what transpires with the counting of the Ohio provisional ballots. If the counting of the provisionals cuts 130,000 down, way down, in size -- it could be a unique December.

And keep your eye on New Mexico.

How to hack the vote

2004-11-17T15:04:00.000-08:00

Chuck Herrin, a self-identified Republican and Professional IT Auditor, quickly points out on his website, Hack the Vote, that the electronic voting systems are not worthy of our trust. Hit that link, and start reading about how easy it is to manipulate a Diebold system.

Once you're done with that, The FAQ is a must-read.

Q: How'd you get involved with this? Aren't you a Republican?

A: I get asked this a lot, and it really shows how focused our country is on partisan politics. I am a voter, first and foremost. That being said, yes, I am a Republican and have been since being sent to Republican Indoctrination Camp at age 2. That's where we are taught supply-side economics and the values of mutually assured destruction. :-)

I got involved with this because I have been against the adoption of these voting systems for years. It's a dumb-ass idea to implement them this way - our votes are too important. I wouldn't trust my Bank with computer systems this insecure; Hell, I wouldn't keep recipes on a system this insecure. When I saw all of the documentation regarding Diebold and their heavy partisan leanings, and then when the results came flooding in with a clear Bush victory when I seriously expected Kerry to win, I put two and two together. I am, by trade, a professional White-Hat Hacker, so I know how easily "secure" systems can be breached, especially by insiders. Roughly 80% of all computer crimes are perpetrated by insiders, so that's always the best place to look first.

Are you shivering yet? How about now:

I personally don't have conclusive evidence that voter fraud was perpetrated, but I can tell you as an Information Security professional that it would have been very, very easy to do. If I had to choose between someone conspiring with exit poll workers nationwide or someone changing values in an Access Database as the cause of the difference between the poll numbers and the "actual" results, I'll go with the easier, more effective option every time. Why choose the hard way when it's more trouble and you're less likely to succeed? Again, I'm staying clear of making specific allegations - I'll leave that to the activists who are gathering data - but I would be much more surprised if the election weren't hacked than to find out that it was.

Okay, pour yourself some coffee. Now read this explanation of why the individual touchscreen machines probably weren't the number one target, if there was one.

With all of the hype about the touch screen terminals, you'd think they'd be a likely target. When you look through Hacker eyes, though, that's the best reason to avoid them. Here's what I think:

I feel that it is unlikely that these individual touch screen machines would be targeted. At greater risk than the individual touch screens are the Central Voting Tabulation computers, which compile the results from many other systems, such as touch screens and optically scanned cards. From a hacker’s standpoint, there are a couple of reasons why these central computers are better targets:

a. It is extremely labor intensive to compromise a large number of systems, and the chance of failure or being detected increases every time an attack is attempted. Also, the controversy surrounding the touch screen terminals ensures that their results will be closely watched, and this theory has been born out in recent days.

b. If one were to compromise the individual terminals, they would only be able to influence a few hundred to maybe a couple of thousand votes. These factors create a very poor risk/reward ratio, which is a key factor in determining which systems it makes sense to attack.

c. On the other hand, the Central Vote Tabulation systems are a very inviting target – by simply compromising one Windows desktop, you could potentially influence tens or hundreds of thousands of votes, with only one attack to execute and only one attack to erase your tracks after. This makes for an extremely attractive target, particularly when one realizes that by compromising these machines you can affect the votes that people cast not only by the new touch screen systems, but also voters using traditional methods, such as optical scanning systems since the tallies from all of these systems are brought together for Centralized Tabulation. This further helps an attacker stay under the radar and avoid detection, since scrutiny will not be as focused on the older systems, even though the vote data is still very much at risk since it is all brought together at a few critical points.

There is much, much more. While some of it starts to border on the Parallax View level of conspiracies, it's also important, in the face of dismissals of "Internet rumors," that we focus on the fact is that these systems are so insecure, and that, regardless of whether or not any hacking did occur, the fact that it would be this possible -- this easy -- for a system to have been hacked has to be corrected for all future elections. For democracy's sake.

Thousands of websites and computer systems of banks and software companies get hacked into all the time. Why wouldn't hackers attempt the same thing with an election?

Race against time

2004-11-17T14:59:00.000-08:00

A reader reminds us that "The Electoral College votes on December 13. The votes must reach Congress by December 22."

The Ohio recounts will not happen until after all the provisional ballots have been totalled up and their vote certified -- which can be done as late as December 1.

So, in the dimmest, dankest of longshots, that an Ohio recount + the provisional ballots would translate into switching Ohio to Kerry -- those recounts would hopefully be done before December 12 or so. Any switches, changes, or addendums would be almost impossibly difficult, says my hunch, if happening after December 13.

Can you hand recount a state -- one of the largest in population -- in 11 days?

Guess we'll see.

Seattle Weekly on Irregularities

2004-11-17T14:25:00.000-08:00

Rick Anderson has written a very fine piece for the Seattle Weekly, entitled, "When It Doesn't Add Up."

Highlight quote:

Voters generally assume their ballots are tabulated, and done so accurately, says Jim Adler, founder and CEO of VoteHere, the Bellevue company that produces new voter verification and election-audit technology. But, in fact, "You walk away, and you hope for the best," he says. Adler recalls seeing votes stacked up on a malfunctioning scanning machine at his King County precinct. People had simply left their ballots and walked out. "We have some idea our vote is recorded," Adler says, "but we have no idea if it was counted."

And here's an interesting fact: what was the only state to use voter-verified paper ballot printers that issue receipts showing, in code, how a person voted, allowing subsequent online verification that the vote was counted?

Nevada.

Consumer Reports on voting machines

2004-11-17T14:14:00.000-08:00

Yes, Consumer Reports -- some of us were given subscriptions to their defunct children's magazine Penny Power when we were kids -- now weighs in on the new voting machines.

Unfortunately, CR seems to buy the "reported problems appeared to be few and far between" line. There's another quote from the oft-quoted Doug Chapin, director of Electiononline.org, "a nonprofit, non-partisan group that conducts research on voting issues," that the election went quite smoothly.

Reports of election incidents on VoteProtect.org, a Web site designed by groups critical of e-voting, showed on November 3, 2004 that more than 1,000 incidents labeled as "machine problems" had been called in by voters, including people from many e-voting precincts. Given that more than 114 million people voted, however, a minuscule number of machine problems were reported.

There's a nice quote from the Stanford computer scientist David Dill pointing out that, while nonelectronic ballots can be reviewed to determine whether machines accurately determined voter intent, there is no easy way to run such an audit with e-voting technology.

"We have to keep in mind," he said, "that recording a vote for the wrong candidate is something that doesn't show up in the statistics."

Cindy Cohn from the Electronic Frontier Foundation cited many troubling voting-machine incidents. "Reports ran the gamut from downed machines that exacerbated long lines to potential calibration problems with touch screens. 'We had a lot of people who said they would go through and vote for Kerry and when the screen came up it showed them voting for Bush,' Ms. Cohen said. She added that voters said they could correct the problem before casting their ballots."

Overall, nothing that we haven't already seen in those "everything went smoothly" stories that seemed much more frequent the first day or two after November 2 than they are now -- as clearly everything did not go smoothly.

I was hoping that Consumer Reports was going to test-drive and compare the ESS, Sequoia, and Diebold systems like they do Chevrolets and Toyotas. Or call for a recall.

And in Washington State...

2004-11-17T11:50:00.000-08:00

... well, there isn't a question of Presidential irregularities, but there is a remarkably tight gubernatorial race that has yet to be decided. In fact, with four counties worth of provisional ballots still to be counted (two strong GOP, two strong Dem), Republican Dino Rossi was ahead by 19 votes to Democratic Attorney General Christine Gregoire.

You read that right. A difference of 19 votes. Out of 2.8 million cast.

Why posting about this here? Because of the hilarious and yet sadly true quote from Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels:

"We live in King County, not Broward County (Florida),'' Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels said. ``Let's count every vote.'

That's what it's all come down to. Broward is now a punchline, synonymous for voting irregularities and suppression of the vote.

In Washington State, if there's a margin of 2,000 votes or smaller, there's an automatic recount. As there should be.

Note that if Chris Gregoire does pull this one out, Washington State will have two female Senators and a female Governor. A first. (California has never had a female Governor during the years Boxer and Feinstein have held their senate seats.)

How many provisional ballots does it take...

2004-11-17T09:59:00.000-08:00

Keith Olbermann, on vacation but not off the case, passes on some of the AP's reporting from Ohio.

The AP is reporting that, "by yesterday, 11 of Ohio’s 88 counties had completed vetting the provisionals and that ten of the districts have accepted the validity of more than 90 percent of them. One— Belmont County (along the West Virginia border)— has tossed 42%, and nearing the halfway mark in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), the election board there has accepted about two-thirds." Cuyahoga was one of Kerry's strongest counties in the state -- he beat Bush 67-33% there, 433,000+ votes to 215+.

Keith notes that mainstream silence on election irregularities is passing: "Sunday, the Hartford Courant printed an op-ed from the Associate Dean of the Yale Law School, Ian Solomon - one of those Democratic lawyers dispatched to Florida to ‘watch’ the election - who suggested the monitors had been too busy verifying the paper ballots to pay attention to the prospect of computerized irregularities (thus, Dean Solomon admitted, “I might have been an unwitting accessory to fraud.”)"

Keith notes that the Globe is planning a piece on the media silence in the next few days. The Washington Times addressed it, too, with the headline “Anti-Bush Internet Site Angles For Election Probe”) by focusing on MoveOn.org’s “Investigate the Vote” campaign.

Congressman Jerry Nadler, Keith reports, says he's expecting a response from the GAO by the end of the week.

It's irrelevant to the subject matter here, but Keith's research team also has some fun with Bill O'Reilly and Roger Ailes contradicting each other. Yes, there's a falafel joke in there, too.