Edmund Storms wrote: > Jed, do you still think these flaws were accidental, a result of > incompetence, or just sloppy design? Do you think the Republicans are > not out to steal the election if they could?
Indeed. There was a lot of noise on the Internet after the 2004 election about the opscan machines in Florida, but it was all misdirection. If you don't know what I'm talking about, read on. (If you've heard all this before, stop right here, this is four year old news.) Statistics can reveal connections but not causes, and the connection was that the right-wing northern Florida counties used opscan machines in 2004, while the left-wing southern Florida counties used Diebold E-touch machines. In northern Florida it's common to register as a Democrat and then vote Republican in the presidential race. That behavior correlated very closely with use of the opscan machines and made it look, for all the world, like somebody cheated when the votes were tallied. What wasn't obvious without a lot of work is that the weird voting patterns predated the use of opscan and E-touch machines, and so couldn't have been caused by them; the selective use of opscan machines, and the weird voting patterns, were both correlated with a third factor, which was demographic. That same strange voting pattern existed in other southern states, and had existed in those areas for at least a couple of elections before 2004 (and apparently existed clear back to the Reconstruction era, which is what it apparently stems from). ** HOWEVER ** all the heat generated by the apparent (but seemingly not real) hanky-panky with the opscan machines obscured something important: The strange skew in voting patterns between northern and southern Florida was not only natural, but should have been *larger* than it was. The southern Florida counties, which vote democratic, and which used E-touch machines, went *just* *a* *little* less democratic in 2004, for no apparent reason. When all known factors were eliminated, something still remained, which makes one wonder. Here's a summary news story on a multivariate analysis done on the southern Florida voting patterns: http://www.computerworld.com/governmenttopics/government/policy/story/0,10801,97614,00.html http://tinyurl.com/5zhbj I don't have a link to the actual paper, nor do I know where it was published; all I've read are news stories in the popular press, so I can't comment on how airtight their analysis was. My own analysis of northern Florida voting patterns, over which I slaved for an enormous number of hours before concluding that the null hypothesis was the correct one regarding opscan voting machine fraud, may be found here (I'm sure I've posted this link here before, but that was a long time ago): http://physicsinsights.org/elec04.html I only wish it hadn't taken me so long to catch onto the "Dixiecrat" factor, since it appears that the grand theft of votes actually took place in areas where I didn't look, because I wasted too much time looking where there weren't any woozles. (Any kind of careful analysis of this sort of thing takes a horrible amount of time to perform, or at any rate that's how I find it to be.) > Do you think the people > running the Diebold company at the time the machines were designed did > not see the connection between helping the Republicans and their product? > > To me, this is the most obvious effort to steal an election that I can > imagine and, what is worse, it helped Bush win. Will it work again? > > Ed > > > On Oct 17, 2008, at 2:00 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote: > >> It couldn't be easier! See: >> >> http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/how-to-steal-an-election-with-a-diebold-machine-200693.php >> >> >> - Jed >> >
