BobHarris.com - Math, not conspiracy theory: item 2

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Math, not conspiracy theory: item 2

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Thursday, 18 November 2004

(For those who came in late, let me recommend this Wikipedia article, which seems a pretty good summary of the story so far.)

Whatever your opinion of the Freeman paper described earlier, I hope you'll check this out, from a press conference which concluded about an hour ago:

UC Berkeley Research Team Sounds 'Smoke Alarm' for Florida E-Vote Count

Statistical Analysis - the Sole Method for Tracking E-Voting - Shows Irregularities May Have Awarded 130,000 - 260,000 or More Excess Votes to Bush in Florida

Research Team Calls for Investigation

The study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods - what the team says can be deemed a "smoke alarm." Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance - the probability is less than 0.1 percent.

The study says there's not even a 1 in 1000 chance that the Florida vote was legit.

(Why not the more astronomical number that Freeman cited? The two may be perfectly consistent: this new study looks at one set of unlikely swing state votes, and Freeman looked at the bigger picture. Improbabilities multiply. If this Florida study is accurate, and just two other states (Ohio and New Hampshire, for example) were only half as bent as Jeb's banana republic... that alone would compound into Freeman's number.)

What the new study finds is also consistent with what a lot of people noticed on election night -- that many of the bluest chunks of Florida were suddenly, um, unusually purple:

The three counties where the voting anomalies were most prevalent were also the most heavily Democratic: Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, respectively. Statistical patterns in counties that did not have e-touch voting machines predict a 28,000 vote decrease in President Bush's support in Broward County; machines tallied an increase of 51,000 votes - a net gain of 81,000 for the incumbent. President Bush should have lost 8,900 votes in Palm Beach County, but instead gained 41,000 - a difference of 49,900. He should have gained only 18,400 votes in Miami-Dade County but saw a gain of 37,000 - a difference of 19,300 votes.

I'm no mathematician, and I'm sure there are readers who understand statistics better than I do. (In fact, I had lunch today with a friend who suggested some problems with the Freeman paper that I'm gonna have to learn more about.) But a whole lot of different academics are starting to notice the exact same thing -- to wit, as the latest paper says (emphasis mine):

"... use of electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this appearing in a population where the true difference is zero - less than once in a thousand chances."

The new study of Florida is here -- complete with .pdf files of the paper and a shorter summary, with direct links to all of the underlying data.

At least I've got something to read over lunch now.

And still, the country that gave the world real-time, currency-converted, to-the-fraction-of-a-penny ATM transactions in 170 countries... can't guarantee the simplest, most basic count of its own votes.