[RRE] Florida recount

kelley kwalker2 at gte.net
Wed Nov 8 16:48:34 PST 2000


declan mccullagh also has some good blow by blows at Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/

From Redrock Eater, Phila Agre has a link below, as well as conservative claims that the vote would have been contested by Bush as well.

Also an explanation from Harris/Ragan Management Group about the confusing ballots

[Peter Orvetti <http://www.orvetti.com/>, whose site was easily the fastest and most reliable last night, says that a locked ballot box was found in a Democratic region of Florida. Missing ballot boxes are a Florida tradition, and I enclose a piece on the 1988 Senate election that Peter Neumann wrote for SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes. Reformatted to 70 columns.]

[People have been sending me a flood of material about the Florida vote, so much that I can hardly keep up with it as I'm typing here. The situation is a mess, and it just gets worse. I've gathered URL's for a great deal of relevant information, and I urge you to pass it along to everyone who can use it. I'm getting so much material, the situation is evolving so fast, and the relevant Web sites are so overloaded, that I cannot guarantee that I have summarized everything 100% accurately, or that the URL's all still work. I've done my best.

<...>

But the missing ballot box was hardly the only problem, or the worst. For example, there are the misleading "butterfly ballots". Here is an article from the Sun-Sentinel newspaper in Palm Beach County:

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/daily/detail/0,1136,36000000000123102,00.html

This article is being continually updated. The Sun-Sentinel Web site is overwhelmed, so keep trying.

You can see an image of the misleading ballot on these pages:

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/elections/palmbeachballot.htm

http://cnews.tribune.com/news/image/0,1119,sunsentinel-nation-82373,00.html

The Democrats are asserting that this ballot design was illegal under Florida law:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/politics/AP-ELN-Florida-Ballot-Confusion.html

Bob Kerrey is calling for a new vote in Florida:

http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/11/07/results/

The problem has two aspects. First, statistical arguments and massive anecdotal evidence suggest that the misleading ballot produced easily enough bad votes to throw the election. Second, one of the authors of the Sun-Sentinel article just said on public radio that something like 20,000 more ballots than one would statistically expect were discarded in the strongly Democratic areas where the misleading ballots were used.

There is a brief statistical discussion of the issue here:

http://cuwu.editthispage.com/2000/11/08

This page should include a dramatic plot of the voting data, but it only seems to appear under certain browsers. Here's another URL for the plot:

http://madison.hss.cmu.edu/palm-beach.pdf

<...>

The police have locked the elections office of Volusia County, Florida (which Gore won) after they caught an employee removing bags from it.

http://orlandosentinel.com/news/1108guard.htm

http://cbsnews.com/now/story/0,1597,247897-412,00.shtml

You can get county-by-county numbers at cnn.com. The numbers do look strange for the down-ballot candidates compared to other counties.

It is worth remembering that Dade and Broward counties in south Florida have big-time histories of voter fraud. For a story on one recent episode, see today's issue of Feed:

http://www.feedmag.com/templates/daily_master.php3?a_id=1389

One Florida journalist mentioned on public radio that the whole Miami area is full of ex-CIA people including right-wing anti-Castro activists and many of the major figures of the Watergate scandal, and that people in Florida are not surprised to hear of strange goings-on in that area.

I also recommend the concise analysis at <http://www.orvetti.com/>.

My conservative friends are telling me what a pissy loser Al Gore is for contesting this problematic vote in Florida. So it's worth noting that the Bush campaign was quite prepared to contest an election if (as widely predicted) he won the popular vote but not the electoral:

http://www.nydailynews.com/2000-11-01/News_and_Views/Beyond_the_City/a-86769.asp

On a different and flakier subject, Consortium News reports that a voter has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission that the New York Times made improper in-kind contributions to the Bush campaign by repeating large numbers of false statements about Al Gore from Bush press releases:

http://www.consortiumnews.com/110700a.html

The complaint probably won't (and shouldn't) succeed, but it does point to a real and serious problem:

http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.The.New.Science.of.C.html

<...>

Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 16:17:14 EST From: HRMG at aol.com

The result of the US Presidential election comes down to who wins Florida. One of the issues of the recount concerns the ballot in Palm Beach County. Because of the number of candidates running, the names of the candidates were placed on two side-by side pages of the voting booklet in the ballot booth. Voters were instructed to find the name of the candidate they wanted to vote for and punch a hole opposite the name in the underlying card.

As it turned out, the first name on the left-hand page of the Presidential ballot was Republican Party candidate George W. Bush; the second name was Al Gore. The first name on the right hand side page was Pat Buchanan, the Reform Party candidate. As a result, those who wanted to vote for Gore needed to find the THIRD HOLE on the page to have their vote properly recorded; many later complained that they mistakenly punched the SECOND HOLE because the Gore name appeared as the SECOND name on the page. If they punched the second hole inadvertently, their vote would have been recorded for Pat Buchanan.

Here are the facts about the vote in Florida and Palm Beach County. There were 5,972,319 total votes cast in Florida with Bush having 2,909,199 and Gore 2,907,544...a difference of 1,655 votes. (Since these numbers were posted on the MyFlorida.com site earlier this morning, additional results have been tabulated and have been reported in the press.) For the record, Ralph Nader won 96,896 total votes in Florida and Pat Buchanan received 20,294...1.62% and .34% of the total, respectively. (Nationally, Nader got 2.6% and Buchanan .44%.)

The results in Palm Beach County were quite different. Here Gore won 62.21% of the vote (268,945) to Bush's 35.36% (152,846). Nader received 5,564 votes (1.29%) and Pat Buchanan, 3,407 votes (.79%). With only 1,655 votes now separating the two principal candidates in Florida and the difference between one party winning the U.S. Presidency and the other losing it, Buchanan's vote count seems highly significant. By my calculation, he received 132% more votes in Palm Beach County than he won in the State overall. Looked at this another way: Palm Beach County represented 7.24% of the State's total vote; but it contributed 17% of the total votes received by Pat Buchanan.

In short, I think some of the voters were in fact confused and that some of the Buchanan vote in Palm Beach County was in fact intended for Al Gore. There were a total of 432,286 votes cast in Palm Beach County; had Buchanan received the same proportion of votes that he received Statewide, he would have gotten only 1,469 votes. Put another way, it suggests that some of the "extra" 1,938 votes that went to Buchanan might actually have been meant for Gore. A change of only 828 votes in the Bush/Gore contest would have reversed the result and given Gore the 25 electoral votes. Conclusion: It is quite plausible to me to suppose that the ballot did in fact confuse enough voters to have had a role in the outcome. The bottom line question is should that be sufficient grounds to try to change the final Florida result if the recount itself leaves the results stand as we know them today?

Godfrey (Jeff) Harris Harris/Ragan Management Group Pulbic Policy Consultants Since 1968 9200 Sunset Blvd., Suite 404 Los Angeles, CA 90069 USA Tel: (1) 310 278 8037 Fax: (1) 310 271 3649 hrmg at aol.com

[Peter Orvetti <http://www.orvetti.com/>, whose site was easily the fastest and most reliable last night, says that a locked ballot box was found in a Democratic region of Florida. Missing ballot boxes are a Florida tradition, and I enclose a piece on the 1988 Senate election that Peter Neumann wrote for SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes. Reformatted to 70 columns.]

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Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 10:20:27 PST From: "Peter G. Neumann" <neumann at csl.sri.com>

[...]

========================================================================

FROM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, January 1989, Peter G. Neumann:

The latest item on the integrity of computers in elections relates to the November 1988 Senate race in Florida. *The New York Times* (Saturday, 12 Nov 88, page 9) had an article by Andrew Rosenthal on suspicions of fraud arising from the results. At the end of the Election Day ballot counting, the Democrat Buddy Mackay was ahead. After the absentee ballots were counted, the Republican Connie Mack was declared the winner by 30,000 votes out of 4 million. However, in four counties (for which B.R.C. provided the computing services), the number of votes counted for Senator was 200,000 votes less than the votes for President while in other counties and in previous elections the two vote totals have generally been close to each other. Remembering that punched card are intrinsically a flaky medium and easy to alter surreptitiously, and that the computer systems in question reportedly permit their operators to turn off the audit trails and to change arbitrary memory locations on the fly, it seems natural to wonder whether anything strange went on. Subsequent to the Times article, a recount was requested, but a selective recount of a few precincts apparently turned up nothing unusual. However, doubts linger about the essential subvertibility of the process -- particularly in the case of punched cards.

In Texas, a law suit has been filed on behalf of the voters of the state challenging the entire election and requesting not a recount but an entirely new election. The grounds are that the State did not follow its own procedures for certifying the election equipment.

Date: Wed, 08 Nov 2000 11:54:09 -0800 From: "Paul H. Rosenberg" <rad at gte.net> To: Phil Agre <pagre at alpha.oac.ucla.edu> Subject: Re: [RRE]Florida recount

Phil,

I was involved in an investigation into irregularities in the 1992 LA Supervisors race. Since it's a non-partisan post & both candidate were Democrats, there was NO instutional support for the challenge. In the course of that investigation, I learned of the Buddy Mackay case, which seems like such a blatant case of electoral fraud that I literally couldn't believe I'd never even heard of it at the time. It was open-and-shut compared to our investigation, but we found substantial evidence as well.

We found significant statistical evidence of irregularities that pointed to misalignment of cards either in the voting or counting process -- things like massive voting levels in down-ballot races for water district combined with low levels of voting in hotly-contested down-ballot races. We cross-checked by doing pairwise comparisons of demographically similar precincts.

There was overwhelming prima facia statistical evidence of voting irregularities -- and the statistics involved were pretty elementary. I even used an off-the-shelf statistical package to generate graphs & illustrations for our report to the DA. But the DA's office (Garcetti had just been elected, but his opponent had withdrawn months before after being forced into a run-off) had NO ONE who was qualified to review the material we presented. They didn't even have someone to retain as a consultant, AND they had no interest in going out and finding someone (say, by picking up the phone and calling UCLA or USC). So nothing came of the case, except that I made some lasting friendships. I called on of them this morning as I learned of the irregularities in Florida this morning.

I strongly urge you to do more on this. I talked to the executive director of the Palm Beach County Democratic Party this morning & offered him what little advice I could, given the differences between the two situations. There's definitely no way of telling which way this will go (but the record to date is not good). I'm including an article from a local Florida paper I downloaded about an hour ago. It's pretty sketchy, but better than nothing. (I'm forwarding your email to the reporter whose email is listed at the end of the story.)

-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net

"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"

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