>http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm
>
>Published on Saturday, November 6, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
>Evidence Mounts That The Vote Was Hacked
>by Thom Hartmann
>
>When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004),
>the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's
>16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has
evidence,
>he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked
>it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people
>had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush
>would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to
>Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.
>
>"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.
>
>And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened
>on November 2, 2004.
>
>The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record
>of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen
>Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available
>at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something
startling.
>
>While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce
>results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched
>the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically
>scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable
>to hacking – the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.
>
>In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them
>Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry
>and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the
>country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.
>
>In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats
>and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry,
>but 4,433 voted for Bush.
>
>The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where
>optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats,
>went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25%
>for Bush.
Well, this is a nice fantasy. I wish people like this Hartmann guy would do their homework a bit, though. While the numbers here are correct, and everything in the citations checks out, they didn't look at the series of votes in '92, '96, the governor's race in '98, and compare those to the 2000 and 2004 results county-by-county. Although I found several surprising county results (more to do there), most of the small rural counties Hartmann talks about have a long history of going Republican at the top of the ticket.
True, I haven't correlated those figures with registration ratios at the time--but I'm not sure anyone's claiming those are unstable. In Florida, especially in rural areas, many local races are decided in the Democratic primary so 'everyone' registers Dem. (The correlation between small counties and Optical Scan machines is simply an artifact of voting machine companies focusing on the big lucrative customers.)
I do want to look a bit more at the counties that seem to have reversed sharply since '96 or '98 but the ones Hartmann talks about--and several other 'high scorers' on Dopp's list--check out as going for Bush/Quayle, Dole, Jeb, in the earlier years at around the same rate they went for Bush this year. For the purposes of this calculation I'm assuming Perot voters go 50-50.
So we're back to all the other widespread threats and misinformation and tossed registrations and waiting lines and secret felon lists and jim crow challenges and all the other stuff of our glorious democracy.
Jenny Brown Gainesville, Florida