from email
It had been suggested that this be posted literally
everywhere, so....
-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Byron [mailto:mpbyron1@]
Sent: Friday, November 19, 2004 13:23
Subject: Hout's findings and my personal assessment of their significance.
All,
Yesterday, Thursday Nov. 18th Prof. Michael Hout, a member of the American Academy of Sciences, and other researchers at U.C. Berkeley, published a paper assessing the Florida Presidential vote. That paper can be read at: http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/ .
Here is Hout’s summary of findings:
The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections
Summary:
- Irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000 excess votes or more to President George W. Bush in Florida.
- Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for President Bush between 2000 and 2004. This effect cannot be explained by differences between counties in income, number of voters, change in voter turnout, or size of Hispanic/Latino population.
- In Broward County alone, President Bush appears to have received approximately 72,000 excess votes.
- We can be 99.9% sure that these effects are not attributable to chance.
Details:
Because many factors impact voting results, statistical tools are necessary to see the effect of touch- screen voting. Multipleregression analysis is a statistical technique widely used in the social and physical sciences to distinguish the individual effects of many variables.
This multiple-regression analysis takes account of the following variables by county:
- number of voters
- median income
- Hispanic population
- change in voter turnout between 2000 and 2004
- support for President Bush in 2000 election
- support for Dole in 1996 election
When one controls for these factors, the association between electronic voting and increased support for President Bush is impossible to overlook. The data show with 99.0% certainty that a county’s use of electronic voting is associated with a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush.
The data used in this study come from CNN.com, the 2000 US Census, the Florida Department of State, and the Verified Voting Foundation – all publicly available sources. This study was carried out by a group of doctoral students in the UC Berkeley sociology department in collaboration with Professor Michael Hout, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center."
I’d note that Hout (I dialed in to his press conference yesterday morning) found a probable range of excess Bush votes of between 130,000 to 260,000. Bush’s "official" margin of victory in Florida seems to be about 377,000 votes per CNN (http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/FL/P/00/index.html). One might conclude that even taking the high figure from this range 260,000 and subtracting it from Bush’s lead still leaves Bush ahead by about 117,000 votes. However, this is likely incorrect, as I will show below.
What is at issue is whether these "ghost" Bush votes were votes that were simply added to the total of votes cast, OR alternately, are they Kerry votes which were electronically ‘flipped". If the latter, then Kerry likely won Florida. Suppose that we take the most probable excess vote total, the median value of this range of 130 - 260 thousand votes, or 195,000. If these represent "flipped" Kerry votes then we must both SUBTRACT 195,000 votes from Bush’s total, AND we must also ADD 195,000 to Kerry’s vote total. This, of course means that there is a net swing of 390,000 votes placing Kerry ahead of Bush by 390,000 - 377,000 or 17,000 votes.
How to determine which contingency is correct? Most of the "false" Bush votes were concentrated in three heavily Democratic south Florida counties per Hout. The addition of about 100,000 "ghost votes" in the three counties would drive apparent turnout to anomalously high levels. No one has reported such a turnout anomaly in these counties. Therefore these "ghost" votes must have been produced by electronically "flipping" real votes for Kerry to Bush. If "flipping" were due to a machine design flaw it ought to be random. But it is not. All "flipping" is from Kerry to Bush. This is evidence of INTENT. All the elements of a crime are now present: Means, motive, opportunity.
Given this conclusion, we now have a probable explanation for the statistically impossible discrepancies [See: http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00227.htm and
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/pdfs/TheUEPDv00l.pdf ] between exit polls and actual vote tallies in targeted swing states nationwide. Willful vote fraud.
Bev Harris’ account of what she observed in Volusia County, Florida this past Tuesday adds physical corroboration to the intentional nature of this fraud. [See http://www.blackboxvoting.org and
also http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/112004X.shtml for details.]
My Conclusion:
I assert that there is no logical reason to believe that George W. Bush was actually elected to any office last Nov. 2nd. [Nor was he elected in 2000, but that is another issue.] Rather, an elaborate crime was committed. If we allow the perpetrators of this crime to get away with it, then America will have become only a hollow shell of a Republic. In reality, it will have become an imperial oligarchy of, for, and by its ruling elite. The American Republic will have become a subject for historians, perhaps it already has. Sure rigged Presidential "elections" might be continued for some time by these elites, but they will be all show, totally lacking in substance. The Republic is dying before our eyes. The Empire is stirring… BUT this transformation has not been completed just yet. There is still a possibility of reviving the Republic…I hope.
Mike Byron
=====
Mark Hull-Richter, U.S. Citizen & Patriot
U.S.A. - From democracy to kakistocracy in one fell
coup.
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0416-01.htm
http://verifiedvoting.org http://blackboxvoting.org
