November 10, 2004
Florida Recount
A map of Pennsylvania and its various voting systems.
Florida Recount
Dear Editor,
What we need to be concerned about are the different results in Florida
depending on whether people's votes were recorded on touch screens or
recorded on paper ballots and READ by the optiscan manchines that were also
in use in 2000.
Based on the voter registration rolls on which voters either choose to be
designated as democrats, republicans or other (IND, Lib, etc), there are
expectations on how the vote will come out.
So, in counties that have moved to touch-screen machines, it was expected
that there would be
1,435,385 Votes for Bush
1,567,297 Votes for Kerry
with Kerry winning by about 130,000
In actual fact, because turnout was higher and independents had a vote too,
the vote came out as follows:
1,845,876 Votes for Bush
1,982,210 Votes for Kerry
with Kerry still winning by about 140,000
HOWEVER, in the counties that use the optscan, the results were a little
different.
The votes expected were:
1,337,242 Votes for Bush
1,432,425 Votes for Kerry
with Kerry winning by less than 100,000
The actual returns were a lot different:
1,950,213 Votes for Bush
1,445,675 Votes for Kerry
with Bush winning by half a million. Note that Kerry still got a little
more than the expected. It's the higher turnout and the independents that
supposedly gave Bush the added 500,000. Does that make sense?
Are you going to argue that evangelicals suddenly discovered that they
needed to vote? Did the Republicans never turn out their base before? Is
it significant that Duval and Alachua counties showed the same anomalous
behavior in 2000?
How do we settle these question? COUNT THE BALLOTS BY HAND. It would be
ironic if the touch-screens that everyone was so worried about are not a
problem, but the fact is that we have no way of testing them at this point.
THE PAPER BALLOTS CAN BE AUDITED BY HAND--NOT HOW MANY THERE ARE, BUT WHAT
THEY HAVE WRITTEN OR MARKED ON THEM. We already know that many of the
so-called "over-votes" which resulted in significant "spoilage" in 2000
were actually the result of dirty ballots.