Analysis of Florida's 67 counties:
Mysterious variance between Touchscreens and Optical-Scanners
Facts:Florida has 67 counties. Florida uses two main types of electronic voting machines, Electronic touchscreen and Optical-Scanners. In this week's election 15 counties used Elec. touchscreens, and 52 used optical scanners. The below databases has lists seperates these two types of voting technology, and shows the actual voting results compared to the total registered Democratic and Republican voters by county, and provides a simple calculation that multiples the % of registred voters by party against the actual vote totals.
'Surprising Pattern of Florida's Election Results'
http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htmWhat the author writes as a "very odd" pattern is a serious understatement. I added up the percentages for the two voting machine technologies and found that on the average, the 15 counties that use Electronic-touchscreen machines showed an incresed voter turnout for Repulicans of 27.9%, and a 23.8% increase in expected trunout for voters who voted Democratic. These 15 counties are typically the larger counties, and together represent 3,863,840 votes, or about half of Florida's total vote. Average turnout was 69.3%, which is quite high. All of this data looks valid for the Electronic Touchscreens used in Florida this past Tuesday.
Question: What Happened with those voters using Optical-Scanners?However, when one lools at the same results for the 52 counties with Optical Scanners, something very strange is immediately apparant.
The increased voting numbers for Republicans averaged a whopping 135.9%, whereas the votes for those registered as Democrats was a negative (-77.3%) when compared to the voter registration data. I am not kidding. That is how skewed the data is for this group. The total number of votes on the optical-scanners was 3,419,852 (slightly less than half of Florida's total vote)
Moreover, this pattern of decreased Democratic voters was found in 30 of the 37 counties whose voter registration roles listed as 50% of more Democratic. In otherwords, counties that had a majority of voters registered as Demcocratic voters showed a significant pattern of "disinterest" in voting in this past election
(range of 37.6% to negative -64.5%), while these same counties had a huge turnout for Republican votes in predominantly Democratic-leaning counties. The range of the increase over projected/expected GOP turnout was 27.3 to 712.3%(!). Again, I kid you not. It is if a very large population of the registered Democratic voters in the Optical scaning counties only - just decided to stay home on Election Day - while the registered Democratic voters in the 15 Electronic-touchscreen countries flocked to the polls in droves. Hmmm....
Answers: There are only 3 possabilities for this startling pattern.1) A very high number of voters registered as Independents or were new voters in Florida showed up to vote Republican on Tuesday - but ONLY in the counties that used Optical-Scanning voting machines. Given that
NO such pattern is remotely exhibited in the 15 counties that used Electronic Touchscreen machines (btw, this population encompasses more people and produced more votes) - this is simply not a plausible explanation. I think
fraud can be ruled in at this point, but what type of fraud? Let's look at the scenarios.
2) Perhaps an incredibly high "ballot spoilage" rate occured in the Optical-scanning counties -
but only for voters who attempted to vote Democratic - not Republican. This is a possible example of what organized fraud/disenfranchisement would look like,
but this scenario seems unlikely given that this same pattern is evident in 30 of the 37 counties that have a plurality of voters registered as Democratic(!). One assumes that many of the Optical-scanning voting machines will be set to allow a "re-vote" if the first attempt did not register a vote. Again, fraud is possible, but the systemic nature of the variance appears too uniform for simple "ballot spoilage" at the precinct & county level.
3) The most likely explanation of why the Optical-scan voters for John Kerry were disproporationately and systematically under-represented in 70% of the these 52 counties is
likely due to vote manipulation of the central tabulation servers. In otherwords, the counties sent their data to a central computer/server ("central tablulator") via a network, and the central server was apparantly "hacked" to produce what can only be described as a absurd variance in the vote total that is way more than statistically significant.
It's almost as if the electronic touchscreen votes were protected from manipulation by a Firewall, while the Optical-scanning votes were categorically "hacked" for almost half the counties of Florida - most of them small counties with the majority of voter registred as Democratic. Honestly, once inside the tabulator/server, I suspect this could done fairly quickly if the dirty work performed by a knowledgeable operative. (Perhaps 1.5 to 2 hours)
According to BlackBox voting, these central vote tabulators can accept up to 1.5 to 2 million votes, and according to various Computer Scientists and INFOSEC experts (which includes this author), the Diebold central tabulators are unsecure in their basic design, easy to hack, and easy to manipulate the voting data.
To recap, both Ohio and Florida's exit polling around 6-7pm on Election night reflected a win for John Kerry, but strangely was not reflected in the final machine counts, and the exit poll numbers were changed by atleast one major network (CNN) around 1 am to reflect the machine counts.
(Nevermind that CNN's 12:21 am exit poll data for Ohio was updated at 1:40am, which showed their sample size increased from 1963 to 2020 polled voters, but reflected a sudden change in statistics all in Bush's favor that was not mathematically possible given the sample size. Seriously, the "revised" percentages were not based on math/reality.) Candidly stated, their is no plausible reason for the "surprising" variance in the Florida vote totals between the Touch-screen versus Optical-Scanner voting machines.
Of ocurse this does help explain why the exit polls showed Kerry leading Florida by 4-5% around 6pm that night. Indeed, the only logical explanation for this variance is widespread fraud in the Florida election for the counties that used Optical-Scanning machines. Period.It should be noted that unlike paper elections, no "recounts" on these currnet systems is required as they will simply produce the same numbers - and the apparant vote manipulation will remain hidden to the observer. That is precisely why a paper-audit trail is needed if we are to have any semblance of a democracy in the United States.
Bottom Line: I and many other INFOSEC experts are convinced that security flaws in the DRE paperless/auditless/'proprietary code' voting system is simply too tempting of a target to ignore for this year's' political operatives - especially when the 2 monopolies (Diebold and ES&S) are heavily-aligned/invested with the GOP. In fact, I suspect this type of manipulation took place in 2000, and I am confident that something of this sort took place in the still unexplained 2002 elections in Georgia.
The only way to prove fraud beyond any shred of doubt would require nothing less than a technical review of the internal audit logs in the central tabulator server(s), and all modem/uplink activity of the central tabulators along with the source code in the harddrives of the voting machines, plus a review of the source code of the central storage servers...all of which would require a small team of network and INFOSEC forensic experts - not lawyers. Well, that ain't gonna happen because Diebold has successfully argued these are "Trade Secrets" issues, and the Republican governments in both Ohio and Florida will not likely allow an expeditious and proper INFOSEC foresic investigation of what is blatant fraud.
It is noteable that exit polling has worked for decades both here in the US and elsewhere, but since the widespread implementation of auditless electronic voting machines in 2000, the exit poll methodlogy has suddenly become flawed? No. Politics is a high-stakes game, and the history of voting manipulation is long and sometimes colorful. But today it can be done quietly from a remote keyboard, and essentially transparent without exit polling data or audit capability.
So, we are now firmly in the Orwellian world of black-box voting. If the People in this country care about their freedom, liberty and democracy, they would demand that Congress mandate any "E-voting" machines to be secure and auditable. The E-votes should be treated in the same way electronic financial transactions have been transmitted/protected for the last 20 years...along with an open review of the data as described above. But that would of course would require campaign finance reform to sever the corporate influence of companies such as Diebold, ES&S, etc, and a Congress that actually wanted the People to have faith in their voting system. Sadly, that is too much to ask in contemporary America.
We live in interesting times...
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