Avedon Carol quotes from the Berkeley report:
The Sideshow November 2004 Archive
Some folks at Berkeley have done a statistical analysis for us, with all sorts of charts and tables and graphs with color lines and everything, The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections. That’s a .pdf (via Bartcop), but here’s the finding for those who don’t want to be bothered:
Electronic voting raised President Bush’s advantage from the tiny edge he held in 2000 to a clearer margin of victory in 2004. The impact of e-voting was not uniform, however. Its impact was proportional to the Democratic support in the county, i.e., it was especially large in Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade. The evidence for this is the statistical significance of terms in our model that gauge the average impact of e-voting across Florida’s 67 counties and statistical interaction effects that gauge its larger-than-average effect in counties where Vice President Gore did the best in 2000 and slightly negative effect in the counties where Mr. Bush did the best in 2000. The state-wide impact of these disparities due to electronic voting amount to 130,000 votes if we assume a “ghost vote” mechanism and twice that – 260,000 votes – if we assume that a vote misattributed to one candidate should have been counted for the other.
She missed the really big part of the story– but then, lots of people have been.
If we assume that the exit polls for those electronic voting areas are reflective across the country, then Bush doesn’t have a three million vote lead. In fact, Kerry may also have won the popular vote.
Do the math yourself, if you like. Take the presidential tallies, and then recalculate the totals based on exit poll numbers versus reported votes.
By my calculations, the nationwide impact of these disparities amount to over 2,300,000 votes, assuming that a vote misattributed to one candidate should have been counted for the other. So Bush’s “mandate” doesn’t seem to be much larger than, say, Al Gore’s.
Now, I’m sure I’m getting the math wrong here, and there are statisticians that can do more with this– I learned just enough in my college stat class to get me into trouble. And if anybody wants to compare and contrast this with states that had heavy e-voting, I’d love to see that too.
It’s over, move on. No data from a liberal college or whinning is going to change that. I hope we don’t have 4 years of this.
Please read the berkely thing. Then weep in embarassment that this got any attention at all.
As for assuming that the exit polls are more accurate than the actual vote count…why stop there? The Newsweek poll had Bush ahead by a very high percentage. Let’s assume that this p[oll was the truth, which is every bit as valid as assuming any other poll (or your Aunt Mildred’s hunch)is the truth. By that “reasoning” Bush actually won by a landslide but perfidous Democrats tried to steal the election. Alas, his mandate was far too large to overcome.
Please. Move. On.
A great critique of the Berkeley study can be found at http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=4038
Frankly, just reading this post is already more time spent on this silliness than it deserves but for those with time on their hands, here’s a short point:
The theory of the Berkeley crew is that the 2004 votes should reflect the 2000 vote. When Bush gets more votes than they predict he should they call them phantom votes or ghost votes and darkly wonder if they were actually Kerry votes that were switched to Bush (Cue all Republicans to go Moo Hoo Hoo Hoo Hwah!)
One might wonder how one can assume that the electorate is the same as 4 years ago. Since the number of total voters grew by 27% since then this is a rather astonishing assumption. The author of the critique,Richard Baehr, points out that if one takes this to its logical end, the 130,000 votes from the 3 suspicious counties should be taken from Bush and given to Kerry. When you do this it is suddenly KERRY who has a suspicious looking margin of victory–suspicious, that is, if one really believes that the voting patterns must match that of 2000.
Unless this is an attempt to do performance art on a large scale, showing Republicans just how zaney and out of touch the right wing looked during the Clinton years, I really don’t get what the left is up to.
Oh, I thought that was self-evident, Glenn, sorry.
Meanwhile, there’s been a study-of-the-study at MIT and lo and behold, this “liberal university” got the same result that Berkeley got.
The essence of the American Thinker article is after-the-fact rationalization of the reported results, not a verifiable refutation of the study. Because results in Florida were anomalous, people have come up with a lot of strange “explanations” for how it could have happened without the machines having made “errors”.
Part of that ratonalizing has involved the claim that for some unknown reason, exit polls “don’t work” anymore – even though they continue to work just fine in other areas, whether Democratic-leaning or Republican-leaning.
This is about an election, not an attempt to figure out something unfathomable like why your girlfriend/boyfriend dumped you. An election is meaningless if its results cannot be verified.
So why are some people so anxious that we pretend not to notice that we have unverifiable election results that don’t make any sense when that is exactly what we do have? Why is it so important to these people that we “get over it” instead of examining the record and making sure our future elections don’t have this much room for error and fraud?
I can’t help the feeling that these people suspect, just as I do, that something funny may be going on – but they like it like that.
Blackboxvoting.org is looking into these anomolies and using the Freedom of Information Act to review results. They have found more than a few instances where the machines haven’t worked as expected. For those of you who say move on, the elections over, well, if we are to have any faith in any future elections we must find out what happened and keep from having any repeats.
I can’t help the feeling that these people suspect, just as I do, that something funny may be going on – but they like it like that.
Something funny is going on, the fact that instead of accepting and understanding that Kerry and the Democrats lost BIG, people refuse to believe that their guy lost based on issues and votes. No it must be something else. Edwards can’t carry his OWN homestate!! What do they know about him that we don’t? Gore couldn’t carry his. Surely this isn’t possible, so it must be something…..sinister afoot. Yup, pretty darn funny. Keep it up that way in 4 years when Dems get beat again because of left conspiracy nuts you can look in the mirror for the cause of defeat.
Avedon, it’s not that it’s not self-evident, but that so few people are making the next logical step, as evidenced by the “he got a mandate!” meme that is becoming so difficult to stamp out. If we grant that the exit polls are the canary in the coalmine that throw the elction tallies into doubt, then we also have to revisit the “mandate” theme, particularly since so many people are touting that as evidence that Bush should be reinstalled.
And as has been previously mentioned, there are lots of people who point to the exit polls and say, “well, it’s obvious that it’s moral issues that swayed the election, because the exit polls tell us so!” and also say “The exit polls must be wrong, because they show Kerry winning the election!”
I think a lot of people glossed over doing that math because if it didn’t affect the state’s outcome, it wasn’t perceived as noteworthy– except that the final tally is noteworthy in the “mandate” sense.
Eric, re: “Edwards can’t carry his OWN homestate!”… is this the same North Carolina that may have to have a do-over election because of voting irregularities? Gee, why would I possibly think something sinister might have happened?
There is NOTHING suspicious in Edwards not carrying North Carolina. As soemone who lives here, it was obvious that this would happen. Indeed, it would have been very very difficult for Edwards to be reelected–even many democrats were annoyed at how their one-term senator had ditched his responsibilities to immediately run for another office.
If Kerry and co had thought they had a chance in NC they would have campaigned here mopre often and had more ads on TV. Thankfully, neither happened (when I visit my daughters in PA I was amazed by how many ads there were on the tube. There are advantages to not being in a swing state)
Bill,
In fact, wasn’t it the Dems that wanted Edwards to declare that he had no intent to run again so that Boles could run? That race also will not be a do over, but I could stand to have a do over in the governor’s race. Maybe if we tout the state employees’ preference poll we could get a do over.
Interestingly enough, surprise surprise, a $200 million dollar surplus, heretofore unknown during the campaign has just been revealed to be a $500K deficit.