Already there a variety of odd phenomena which have aroused suspicions about this possibility:
For example:
- In Florida Bush received a million extra votes, while Kerry received only 500,000 extra votes, in spite of a massive Democratic Get-Out-The-Vote(GOTV) and registration campaign in that state;
- In Florida's Broward County, a democratic stronghold and heavily black community, unauditable voting machines recorded a 33% (70,000+) vote gain on Bush's 2000 results and a much smaller gain to Kerry รข€“ again Broward was the scene of a massive GOTV campaign;
- In several places voters reported voting for Kerry but noticing the machine record their vote for Bush;
- Recollections, reported here at Scoop.co.nz in 2003, that there is evidence of vote fraud in Florida in 2000 involving security holes in voting systems;
- Observations that many of the security flaws reported in mid 2003 in vote counting systems remained in place for the 2004 count last night.
But by far the most wide source of public suspicion about the results came from the stark difference between the exit polls, which showed strong Kerry leads in many battleground states including Ohio and Florida, and the actual results in those same states. Bush achieved a 5% margin of victory in Florida and came very close to winning Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Add in the fact that the reported exit poll results were changed in the early hours of Wednesday morning, and there was a recipe for suspicion brewing in the online internet vote fraud community last night.
In order to attempt to get a firmer hold on the extent of vote fraud if it did occur Faun Otter (a veteran of the U.S. based vote fraud investigative community) conducted the following preliminary analysis comparing the initial exit poll results (note this link takes you to the revised results) vs actual results.
For example:
- In Florida Bush received a million extra votes, while Kerry received only 500,000 extra votes, in spite of a massive Democratic Get-Out-The-Vote(GOTV) and registration campaign in that state;
- In Florida's Broward County, a democratic stronghold and heavily black community, unauditable voting machines recorded a 33% (70,000+) vote gain on Bush's 2000 results and a much smaller gain to Kerry รข€“ again Broward was the scene of a massive GOTV campaign;
- In several places voters reported voting for Kerry but noticing the machine record their vote for Bush;
- Recollections, reported here at Scoop.co.nz in 2003, that there is evidence of vote fraud in Florida in 2000 involving security holes in voting systems;
- Observations that many of the security flaws reported in mid 2003 in vote counting systems remained in place for the 2004 count last night.
But by far the most wide source of public suspicion about the results came from the stark difference between the exit polls, which showed strong Kerry leads in many battleground states including Ohio and Florida, and the actual results in those same states. Bush achieved a 5% margin of victory in Florida and came very close to winning Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Add in the fact that the reported exit poll results were changed in the early hours of Wednesday morning, and there was a recipe for suspicion brewing in the online internet vote fraud community last night.
In order to attempt to get a firmer hold on the extent of vote fraud if it did occur Faun Otter (a veteran of the U.S. based vote fraud investigative community) conducted the following preliminary analysis comparing the initial exit poll results (note this link takes you to the revised results) vs actual results.
Repeat: MSNBC corrected exit poll results to fit reported vote results.
Correction is the procedure by which the exit polls are retrofitted to match the figures provided by the vote counting machines. It is easily done by changing the exit poll results, such as the 2.00 a.m. flip-flop of the Nevada exit poll scores which was done without any change to the sample size. A slightly less obvious sleight of hand is to alter the weighting. Weighting is the name for a multiplier used to correct sample subgroups to match the proportions in the whole of a state population. Thus an exit poll can be "corrected" by saying something to the effect,
"Oh well, the vote results show we must have under sampled Republicans and therefore we'll multiply that subgroup of the exit poll sample by 1.5 to make our results fit the figures the ballot counting machines are spitting out."
...The Bush people argue that the exit polls are skewed by the methodology employed. It is odd that they don't say what that error producing part of the methodology might be. A skew means a systematic error is introduced by the test protocol and causes a consistent shift in one direction.
IF this was true, then all the exit polls would show the same sort of shift from 'actual' results.
The GOP offer an alternative argument that the exit polls are not large enough samples and therefore the results are off by a large random error.
IF this was true, then the exit polls should scatter on either side of the actual result, especially if the final result is close to 50/50.
So what do we actually see when comparing exit polls with actual results?
There is skew - but ONLY in states which the Republicans had previously stated to be target states in play. The skew is in the same direction every time; that is to say in favor of Bush.
"Oh well, the vote results show we must have under sampled Republicans and therefore we'll multiply that subgroup of the exit poll sample by 1.5 to make our results fit the figures the ballot counting machines are spitting out."
...The Bush people argue that the exit polls are skewed by the methodology employed. It is odd that they don't say what that error producing part of the methodology might be. A skew means a systematic error is introduced by the test protocol and causes a consistent shift in one direction.
IF this was true, then all the exit polls would show the same sort of shift from 'actual' results.
The GOP offer an alternative argument that the exit polls are not large enough samples and therefore the results are off by a large random error.
IF this was true, then the exit polls should scatter on either side of the actual result, especially if the final result is close to 50/50.
So what do we actually see when comparing exit polls with actual results?
There is skew - but ONLY in states which the Republicans had previously stated to be target states in play. The skew is in the same direction every time; that is to say in favor of Bush.
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