Election Questions Build
Toward Recount
By Greg Guma
24 November, 2004
Vermont GuardianCharges of voting irregularities during the U.S. presidential election continue to snowball. As pressure builds for a recount in Ohio, the voting rights group Election Verification Project claims that the record use of electronic voting machines led to hundreds of anomalies that demonstrate the need for higher standards. Meanwhile, the Internet buzzes with charges that the mainstream media is attempting to suppress the story.
The Electronic Verification Project has reviewed nearly 900 reports of electronic voting problems on Election Day, ranging from lost votes in North Carolina to miscounted votes in Ohio and breakdowns in New Orleans that caused long lines and shut down polling places.
A research team at the University of California at Berkeley says that irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded up to 260,000 or more excess votes to George W. Bush in Florida. That study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods.
The team, led by Prof. Michael Hout, said discrepancies this large rarely arise by chance. Noting that the probability is less than 0.1 percent, they urged an immediate investigation.
“The three counties where the voting anomalies were most prevalent were also the most heavily Democratic,” said Hout, “not the [conservative] Dixiecrat counties you’ve all heard about before, but the more heavily Democratic counties that used e-vote technology, including Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade counties, in order of magnitude.”
The disparity favoring Bush can’t be explained by other factors, Hout claims. “The study shows that counties that used electronic voting resulted in disproportionate increases of votes for the president.”
Commenting on the difference between exit polls and official vote counts, John Zogby, president of the polling company that bears his name, said, “Something is definitely wrong.” It would have required “wrong sampling in wrong areas throughout the country,” or the purposeful manipulation of data to obtain exit poll results so significantly different from the official totals. Neither is a possibility, he argued.
University of Pennsylvania Professor Steven Freeman has compiled an analysis, “The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy,” noting that in three of the key battleground states — Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania — the odds of Democratic challenger John Kerry receiving the percentage of votes recorded, given the exit poll findings, were less than three in 1,000, per state.
The odds of any two of these states simultaneously reaching their stated vote tallies were “on the order of one in a million,” he added, and the odds of all three states arriving at the vote counts they did “are 250 million to one.”
On Nov. 18, the League of Women Voters called for an investigation. Common Cause has teamed up with the National Voting Rights Institute, Demos, People for the American Way Foundation, and the Fannie Lou Hamer Project to support an Ohio recount request by the Green and Libertarian presidential candidates. They also urged election officials in every state to preserve, protect, and maintain all ballots from the election, whether cast on machine, by absentee, or by provisional ballot.
Despite John Kerry’s concession speech, the Ohio Democratic Party has launched a federal court fight over nearly 155,000 provisional ballots, contending that a proper accounting of those votes might decide who really won.
A statewide recount in Ohio appears inevitable and would be conducted after the election results are certified in early December. Libertarian Michael Badnarik and the Green Party’s David Cobb say they have raised more than $150,000, mostly in small contributions. Ohio law requires payment of $10 per precinct for a recount, or about $113,000 statewide.
Explosive allegations about a media cover-up also are percolating.Fueling the theory is an e-mail about a CBS producer who allegedly complained that a news industry “lockdown” has prevented journalists from investigating voting problems. Bev Harris, executive director of Black Box Voting, Inc., says she received calls from network employees saying they had been told to lay off the subject of vote fraud.
©2004 Vermont Guardian
