Subject: RE: Hack the Vote ? - some older numbers
From: "Daniel P. Tokaji" <tokaji.1@osu.edu>
Date: 11/9/2004, 12:20 PM
To: "Henry E. Brady" <hbrady@csm.berkeley.edu>, "'election-law'" <election-law@majordomo.lls.edu>

<x-flowed>Have blogged on this subject as well as some of the "Kerry Won" claims that have arisen from Ohio here: http://equalvote.blogspot.com/2004_11_01_equalvote_archive.html#109996076062163291
I'm persuaded by Mebane's analysis of Florida, to which Henry refers.  Bryan Pfaffenberger's got a nifty map which graphically illustrates what went on in the panhandle and central Florida:
http://www.battlebunny.org/

Dan

Daniel P. Tokaji
Assistant Professor of Law
The Ohio State University
Moritz College of Law
55 W. 12th Ave.
Columbus, OH 43210
voice:  614-292-6566
fax:  614-688-8422
tokaji.1@osu.edu
http://equalvote.blogspot.com/
At 01:50 PM 11/9/2004, Henry E. Brady wrote:
The following from Walter Mebane at Cornell and his collaborators seems rather definitive on this topic.  They conclude that there is no evidence of a problem by looking at past voting in those Counties.  Mebane and his collaborators (including me) did considerable work showing that the butterfly ballot in 2000 did lead to at least 2000 Gore voters mistakenly voting for Buchanan so we are not naive about the possibilities.

TO SHORTEN THE MESSAGE, I HAVE OMITTED THE DATA AND JUST INCLUDED THEIR SUMMARY OF IT.   The short summary is that the phenomenon is the result of the continuing realignment in the South -- there are voters who continue to register Democratic (perhaps because they have not bothered to change their registration in years) but who increasingly vote Republican.

Henry Brady
University of California, Berkeley


FROM WALTER MEBANE AND HIS COLLABORATORS:

To the Editor:

Regarding "Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked," by Thom Hartmann

<http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm>http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm

Jasjeet Sekhon <jasjeet_sekhon@harvard.edu>, Jonathan Wand <wand@stanford.edu> and I <wrm1@cornell.edu> have looked into the allegation of vote fraud involving optical scan voting machines in the

2004 presidential election voting in Florida. Based on the data shown below, we conclude that allegation is baseless. Instead, the pattern in which counties that have high Democratic registration had high percentage increases in the vote for Bush reflects the fact that all those counties have trended strongly Republican over the past twelve years. The counties are mostly in the Florida Panhandle. Given the voting history and registration trends, these counties seem to have many old-style southern Democrats who have not bothered to change their registration.

The story

<http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm>http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm

refers to data originally posted at

<http://www.jefffisherforcongress.com/>http://www.jefffisherforcongress.com/

in particular at

<http://www.jefffisherforcongress.com/Campaign2006/SurprisingFloridaPresidentialElectionResults.htm>http://www.jefffisherforcongress.com/Campaign2006/SurprisingFloridaPresidentialElectionResults.htm

In the following tables, (E) or (O) after the county name indicates whether the voting machine was E-Touch or Op-Scan. The column labeled

DemChg04 is the Percent Change Dem statistic from table at the aforementioned link. Columns DemV00, DemV96 and DemV92 give the proportion of votes cast for the Democratic presidential candidate in election years 2000, 1996 and 1992. Columns DemR04, DemR00 and DemR96 give the proportion of voters registered Democratic in 2004, 2000 and 1996, and columns RepR04, RepR00 and RepR96 give the proportion registered Republican.  You can see that the counties that have big negative values for DemChg04 have had low proportions voting Democratic but high proportions registered Democratic going all the way back to 1992 (Table 1). The proportion registered Democratic has been decreasing, albeit slowly, while the proportion registered Republican has been increasing, again slowly (Table 2).

At 09:48 PM 11/7/2004 -0800, Karl Manheim wrote:
An article on CommonDreams.org reports the possibility of vote tampering in Florida.  It analyzes significant disparities between party registrations and votes for Kerry/Bush in counties using optical scanners, in contrast to counties using touch-screens where those disparities didn't show up.

See <http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm>Thom Hartmann, <http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm>Evidence Mounts That the Vote May Have Been Hacked (Nov. 6, 2004).

Karl





--
Karl Manheim
Loyola Law School
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