[Vision2020] I Smell a Rat

[Tbertruss at aol.com]

http://www.zogby.com/soundbites/ReadClips.dbm?ID=10414
    
I Smell a Rat

I smell a rat. It has that distinctive and all-too-familiar odor of the 
species Republicanus floridius. We got a nasty bite from this pest four years ago 
and never quite recovered. Symptoms of a long-term infection are becoming 
distressingly apparent. The first sign of the rat was on election night. The 
jubilation of early exit polling had given way to rising anxiety as states fell one 
by one to the Red Tide. It was getting late in the smoky cellar of a Prague 
sports bar where a crowd of expats had gathered. We had been hoping to go home 
to bed early, confident of victory. Those hopes had evaporated in a flurry of 
early precinct reports from Florida and Ohio. 

By 3 AM, conversation had died and we were grimly sipping beers and watching 
as those two key states seemed to be slipping further and further to crimson. 
Suddenly, a friend who had left two hours earlier rushed in and handed us a 
printout. 

"Zogby's calling it for Kerry." He smacked the sheet decisively. "Definitely. 
He's got both Florida and Ohio in the Kerry column. Kerry only needs one." 
Satisfied, we went to bed, confident we would wake with the world a better 
place. Victory was at hand. 

The morning told a different story, of course. No Florida victory for Kerry - 
Bush had a decisive margin of nearly 400,000 votes. Ohio was not even close 
enough for Kerry to demand that all the votes be counted. The pollsters had 
been dead wrong, Bush had four more years and a powerful mandate. Onward 
Christian soldiers - next stop, Tehran. 

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics 

I work with statistics and polling data every day. Something rubbed me the 
wrong way. I checked the exit polls for Florida - all wrong. CNN's results 
indicated a Kerry win: turnout matched voter registration, and independents had 
broken 59% to 41% for Kerry. 

Polling is an imprecise science. Yet its very imprecision is itself 
quantifiable and follows regular patterns. Differences between actual results and those 
expected from polling data must be explainable by identifiable factors if the 
polling sample is robust enough. With almost 3.000 respondents in Florida 
alone, the CNN poll sample was pretty robust. 

The first signs of the rat were identified by Kathy Dopp, who conducted a 
simple analysis of voter registrations by party in Florida and compared them to 
presidential vote results. Basically she multiplied the total votes cast in a 
county by the percentage of voters registered Republican: this gave an expected 
Republican vote. She then compared this to the actual result. 

Her analysis is startling. Certain counties voted for Bush far in excess of 
what one would expect based on the share of Republican registrations in that 
county. They key phrase is "certain counties" - there is extraordinary variance 
between individual counties. Most counties fall more or less in line with what 
one would expect based on the share of Republican registrations, but some 
differ wildly. 

How to explain this incredible variance? Dopp found one over-riding factor: 
whether the county used electronic touch-screen voting, or paper ballots which 
were optically scanned into a computer. All of those with touch-screen voting 
had results relatively in line with her expected results, while all of those 
with extreme variance were in counties with optical scanning. 

The intimation, clearly, is fraud. Ballots are scanned; results are fed into 
precinct computers; these are sent to a county-wide database, whose results 
are fed into the statewide electoral totals. At any point after physical ballots 
become databases, the system is vulnerable to external hackers. 

It seemed too easy, and Dopp's method seemed simplistic. I re-ran the results 
using CNN's exit polling data. In each county, I took the number of 
registrations and assigned correctional factors based on the CNN poll to predict 
turnout among Republicans, Democrats, and independents. I then used the vote shares 
from the polls to predict a likely number of Republican votes per county. I 
compared this 'expected' Republican vote to the actual Republican vote. 

The results are shocking. Overall, Bush received 2% fewer votes in counties 
with electronic touch-screen voting than expected. In counties with optical 
scanning, he received 16% more. This 16% would not be strange if it were spread 
across counties more or less evenly. It is not. In 11 different counties, the 
'actual' Bush vote was at least twice higher than the expected vote. 13 
counties had Bush vote tallies 50 - 100% higher than expected. In one county where 
88% of voters are registered Democrats, Bush got nearly two thirds of the vote - 
three times more than predicted by my model. 

Again, polling can be wrong. It is difficult to believe it can be that wrong. 
Fortunately, however, we can test how wrong it would have to be to give the 
'actual' result. 

I tested two alternative scenarios to see how wrong CNN would have to have 
been to explain the election result. In the first, I assumed they had been 
wildly off the mark in the turnout figures - i.e. far more Republicans and 
independents had come out than Democrats. In the second I assumed the voting shares 
were completely wrong, and that the Republicans had been able to massively poach 
voters from the Democrat base. 

In the first scenario, I assumed 90% of Republicans and independents voted, 
and the remaining ballots were cast by Democrats. This explains the result in 
counties with optical scanning to within 5%. However, in this scenario 
Democratic turnout would have been only 51% in the optical scanning counties - barely 
exceeding half of Republican turnout. It also does not solve the enormous 
problems in individual counties. 7 counties in this scenario still have actual 
vote tallies for Bush that are at least 100% higher than predicted by the model - 
an extremely unlikely result. 

In the second scenario I assumed that Bush had actually got 100% of the vote 
from Republicans and 50% from independents (versus CNN polling results which 
were 93% and 41% respectively). If this gave enough votes for Bush to explain 
the county's results, I left the amount of Democratic registered voters ballots 
cast for Bush as they were predicted by CNN (14% voted for Bush). If this did 
not explain the result, I calculated how many Democrats would have to vote 
for Bush. 

In 41 of 52 counties, this did not explain the result and Bush must have 
gotten more than CNN's predicted 14% of Democratic ballots - not an unreasonable 
assumption by itself. However, in 21 counties more than 50% of Democratic votes 
would have to have defected to Bush to account for the county result - in 
four counties, at least 70% would have been required. These results are absurdly 
unlikely. 

The Second Rat 

A previously undiscovered species of rat, Republicanus cuyahogus, has been 
found in Ohio. Before the election, I wrote snide letters to a state legislator 
for Cuyahoga county who, according to media reports, was preparing an army of 
enforcers to keep 'suspect' (read: minority) voters away from the polls. One 
of his assistants wrote me back very pleasant mails to the effect that they had 
no intention of trying to suppress voter turnout, and in fact only wanted to 
encourage people to vote. 

They did their job too well. According to the official statistics for 
Cuyahoga county, a number of precincts had voter turnout well above the national 
average: in fact, turnout was well over 100% of registered voters, and in several 
cases well above the total number of people who have lived in the precinct in 
the last century or so. 

In 30 precincts, more ballots were cast than voters were registered in the 
county. According to county regulations, voters must cast their ballot in the 
precinct in which they are registered. Yet in these thirty precincts, nearly 
100.000 more people voted than are registered to vote - this out of a total of 
251.946 registrations. These are not marginal differences - this is a 39% 
over-vote. In some precincts the over-vote was well over 100%. One precinct with 558 
registered voters cast nearly 9,000 ballots. As one astute observer noted, 
it's the ballot-box equivalent of Jesus' miracle of the fishes. Bush being such 
a man of God, perhaps we should not be surprised. 

What to Do? 

This is not an idle statistical exercise. Either the raw data from two 
critical battleground states is completely erroneous, or something has gone horribly 
awry in our electoral system - again. Like many Americans, I was dissatisfied 
with and suspicious of the way the Florida recount was resolved in 2000. But 
at the same time, I was convinced of one thing: we must let the system work, 
and accept its result, no matter how unjust it might appear. 

With this acceptance, we placed our implicit faith in the Bush Administration 
that it would not abuse its position: that it would recognize its fragile 
mandate for what it was, respect the will of the majority of people who voted 
against them, and move to build consensus wherever possible and effect change 
cautiously when needed. Above all, we believed that both Democrats and 
Republicans would recognize the over-riding importance of revitalizing the integrity of 
the electoral system and healing the bruised faith of both constituencies. 

This faith has been shattered. Bush has not led the nation to unity, but 
ruled through fear and division. Dishonesty and deceit in areas critical to the 
public interest have been the hallmark of his Administration. I state this not 
to throw gratuitous insults, but to place the Florida and Ohio electoral 
results in their proper context. For the GOP to claim now that we must take anything 
on faith, let alone astonishingly suspicious results in a hard-fought and 
extraordinarily bitter election, is pure fantasy. It does not even merit 
discussion. 

The facts as I see them now defy all logical explanations save one - massive 
and systematic vote fraud. We cannot accept the result of the 2004 
presidential election as legitimate until these discrepancies are rigorously and 
completely explained. From the Valerie Plame case to the horrors of Abu Ghraib, George 
Bush has been reluctant to seek answers and assign accountability when it 
does not suit his purposes. But this is one time when no American should accept 
not getting a straight answer. Until then, George Bush is still, and will 
remain, the 'Accidental President' of 2000. One of his many enduring and shameful 
legacies will be that of seizing power through two illegitimate elections 
conducted on his brother's watch, and engineering a fundamental corruption at the 
very heart of the greatest democracy the world has known. We must not permit 
this to happen again. 



(11/15/2004) 
     - By Colin Shea, The Sierra Times, Freezer Box 

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V2020 Post by Ted Moffett
    
    

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