Researchers: Florida Vote Fishy 

By Kim Zetter  WiredNews  12:18 PM Nov. 18, 2004 PT

Electronic voting machines in Florida may have awarded George W. Bush up to 260,000 more votes than he should have received, according to data examined by University of California, Berkeley graduate students and a professor, who released a study on Thursday.
 
 
Their aim in releasing the report, the researchers said, was not to attack the results of the 2004 election in Florida, where Bush won by 350,000 votes, but to prompt election officials and the public to examine the e-voting systems and address the fact that there is no way to conduct a meaningful recount on the paperless machines.

The analysis which hasn't been formally peer-reviewed, but was examined by seven professors showed a discrepancy in the number of votes Bush received in counties that used the touch-screen machines and counties that used other types of voting equipment. The researchers examined numerous variables that might have affected the vote outcome. These included the number of voters, their median income, racial and age makeup and the change in voter turnout between the 2000 and 2004 elections. Using this information, they examined election results for the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates in the state in 1996, 2000 and 2004 to see how support for those candidates and parties measured over eight years in Florida's 67 counties.

They discovered that in the 15 counties using touch-screen voting systems, the number of votes granted to Bush far exceeded the number of votes Bush should have received given all of the other variables while the number of votes that Bush received in counties using other types of voting equipment lined up perfectly with what the variables would have predicted for those counties.

The total number of excessive votes ranged between 130,000 and 260,000, depending on whether researchers applied strict or more lenient analysis of the variables. The counties most affected by the anomaly were heavily Democratic.

Sociology professor Michael Hout, who chairs the university's graduate Sociology and Demography group, said the chance for such a discrepancy to occur was less than 1 in 1,000.

"No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained," he said in a statement. "There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this appearing in a population where the true difference is zero less than once in a thousand chances."

The three counties where anomalies were most prevalent were Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade. In Broward, statistical analysis showed that Bush should have received 28,000 fewer votes this year than in 2000. In fact, he received 51,000 more votes than expected, for a net gain of 81,000 votes. In Palm Beach county, analysis showed that Bush should have received 8,900 fewer votes. But instead he gained 41,000. In Miami-Dade county he was expected to gain votes, but by much less than he actually did. According to the researchers he should have received only 18,400 more votes, but he actually received 37,000, a gain of 19,300 beyond the expectation.

Both Broward and Miami-Dade counties use machines made by Election Systems & Software, while Palm Beach county uses machines made by Sequoia Voting Systems. No Florida counties used touch-screen machines made by Diebold Election Systems, the company whose machines have received the most scrutiny over the last year.

Jenny Nash, press secretary for the Florida Department of State, said she would not comment on a report that she had not yet read. She said Florida had been using its current voting systems since 2002 and had "delivered hundreds of successful elections using the systems."

"Florida has one of the most rigorous certification processes in the nation," Nash said. "After a system is certified for use ... then every single voting systems is tested prior to the election, sealed, and then that seal is not broken until Election Day. We have never had any reports from supervisors of machines malfunctioning or of votes being lost."

Graduate students from Berkeley's Quantitative Methods Research Team launched the research project after following debates in the blogosphere about possible fraud in the election. After examining and discounting many other theories, such as ones involving optical-scan machines in Florida, they decided to look at counties that used touch-screen voting machines.

Touch-screen machines became the focus of much debate last year when computer scientists who examined the systems released several reports showing that the machines were vulnerable to hacking and vote manipulation.

The researchers would not speculate on possible causes for the vote discrepancies; they said they would leave it to officials to figure that out.