I scoffed at the Berkeley report that has been making the rounds. According to the authors:
(E)lectronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election. 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.”
I thought to myself, “Hey guys, the election is over, we’ve got to move on.”
Then, via an e-mail from a friend, I checked out Keith Olbermann’s blog at MSNBC where he writes about the study:
None of the coverage of the Berkeley study clarified a vitally important point about its conclusions regarding the touch-screen wobble in the fifteen Florida counties, and that has led to some unjustified optimism on the activist and Democratic sides. Its math produced two distinct numbers for ìghost votesî for President Bush: 130,000 and 260,000. This has led to the assumption in many quarters that Cal Tech has suggested as many as 260,000 Florida votes could swing from Bush to Kerry (enough to overturn the state). In fact - and the academics got a little too academic in summarizing their report and thus, this kind of got lost - the two numbers already consider the prospect of a swing:
a) There may have been 130,000 votes simply added to the Bush total. If proved and excised, they would reduce the Presidentís Florida margin from approximately 350,000 votes to approximately 220,000;
b) There may have been 130,000 votes switched from Kerry to Bush. If proved and corrected, they would reduce (by double the 130,000 figure - namely 260,000) the Presidentís Florida margin from approximately 350,000 votes to approximately 90,000.
So, if I read this correctly, this means that Kerry *might* have won Florida. There are a lot of “shoulda, coulda, wouldas”, but the point is worth noticing.
But wait, there’s more.
On the ground in Florida, uncounted ballots continue to turn up in Pinellas County. Last Monday, an unmarked bankerís box with 268 absentee ballots was discovered ìsitting in plain sight on an office floor, with papers and other boxes stacked on top of it,î according to The St. Petersburg Times. On Friday, the same paper reported that County Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark found twelve more - ten provisionals in a blue pouch at a loading dock, and two absentees in a box headed for a storage facility. ìIím sick about this,î the paper quoted Clark, whose office also whiffed on 1400 absentee ballots on Election Day 2000, and counted another 600 twice. Asked by a reporter if the election is over, she replied ìI certainly hope so.î
Apparently, there were some problems in North Carolina also. According to a representative of Congressman Mel Watt (yes, I called y’all) some electronic voting machines didn’t register votes correctly. The guy on the phone couldn’t go into details, but Watt, along with five other congressmen and women have written the General Accounting Office to ask for an investigation into machine irregularities.
Funny, how can we bring “democracy” and “fair elections” to certain areas when we don’t know what the hell we’re doing ourselves?