Broken but not Bent

[khaosworks]

Was the election stolen?
The system is clearly broken. But there is no evidence that Bush won because of voter fraud.
By Farhad Manjoo

Nov. 10, 2004 | Did John Kerry actually win the presidency? If you've spent any time online this week, you've no doubt heard this argument: The election was stolen. Corrupt officials, rigged voting machines, a sleepy media and a Democratic Party that's been less than fully aggressive in its efforts to counter Republican dirty tricks came together to subvert the true will of the people.

According to proponents of this theory, proof of electoral fraud abounds. The journalist Greg Palast argues that in Ohio, there were probably enough "spoiled" punch-card ballots -- ballots tossed out by counting machines -- to make up Bush's margin over Kerry. Keith Olbermann points out that in some voting precincts in Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, there were more votes cast than registered voters -- for instance, in the Fairview Park area, 13,342 registered voters cast 18,472 ballots. Isn't that odd? Then there's the analysis by a former high school math teacher named Kathy Dopp, which seems to show that in counties using optical-scan voting systems in Florida, people registered as Democrats voted for Bush at an usually high rate. Did they really mean to do that, or did the voting machines corrupt their votes?

There are dozens of other points of concern. In Broward County, Florida, the counting software has been counting votes backwards. In Franklin County, Ohio, Bush was somehow given 4,000 more votes than he'd actually won. Citing vague security concerns, officials in Warren County, Ohio, locked down the vote-counting building on election night, preventing the media from observing the count. And what about those exit polls? Could it be that they were correct in their prediction of a Kerry win? To judge from the tone of the e-mail pouring into our in boxes here at Salon, not to mention the panicky posts on lefty sites like Democratic Underground, it's clear that many online find these arguments quite convincing. For many, it's difficult to believe that the election the nation held last week was completely on the level.

In fact, it probably wasn't; Election Day 2004, like all national elections, saw its share of glitches, ineptitude, fraud and intimidation. The Election Incident Reporting System, a national database of election irregularities compiled by volunteers working with various voting-rights groups, lists 30,000 such incidents for 2004. They range from the tragic (a voter who "didn't know how to read") to the alarming ("Two African-American voters were arrested at the polling place before they had the opportunity to vote").

There's little question that the American election process is a mess, and needs to be cleaned up. But even if this particular election wasn't perfect, it was still most likely good enough for us to have faith in the results. Salon has examined some of the most popular Kerry-actually-won theories currently making the rounds online, and none of them hold up under rigorous scrutiny. For instance, there's an easy explanation for the odd results in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where Olbermann insists there were 93,000 more votes than voters. According to Kimberly Bartlett, a spokeswoman for the county, the reporting software the county uses to display the unofficial summary of election results on its Web site is simply buggy. For some reason, the software combines absentee ballots from several voting precincts into one precinct, and therefore makes it appear as if there were more votes cast in a particular area than there were registered voters there. But this bug does not affect the final election results, because the more detailed "canvass" of all the votes cast in the county shows the correct count, Bartlett told Salon. For example, this canvass indicates that in Fairview Park, where Olbermann says there were 18,472 ballots cast by 13,342 registered voters, there were actually only 8,421 votes cast in the presidential race -- fewer than the number of registered voters.

Other theories pointing to a Kerry win are similarly brittle. It is extremely unlikely that there are enough spoiled punch-card ballots in Ohio to hand Kerry a victory there, as Palast asserts. Meanwhile, there are reasonable-sounding sociological and demographic explanations for the high number of registered-Democrat Bush voters in some counties in Florida. There is, in other words, simply no compelling proof that there were enough irregularities in enough areas affecting enough voters to cast doubt on Bush's commanding popular vote count lead, or even his thinner margins in key swing states such as Ohio or Florida.

"Given my current state of knowledge, it seems unlikely there will be enough bogus votes found to reverse the election," says David Dill, the Stanford computer scientist who's been leading the charge against paperless electronic voting machines for the past two years. At the same time, though, Dill adds that he's making "a highly qualified statement," and that he does not want to "declare the election over and done with." Odd things did occur last Tuesday, and even if the results aren't overturned, "it's extremely important that we seize this opportunity to review everything we can about this election," Dill says. "Having people comb through these results will give us more confidence in the legitimacy of this election. We shouldn't gain that confidence by resorting to the head-in-the-sand method we usually employ in the United States."

More at the link.

The "vote fraud" story has gone from the fringe to hit the mainstream media. Here's a Windows Media clip from MSNBC. Google News on "voting irregularity" should show up a whole list of articles reporting on this.

Comments

[shikyrie.livejournal.com]

And why SHOULDN'T we believe that the election was rigged this time around? We all know it was rigged in '00, so what do they have to offer to make us think otherwise?

Well...

[(Anonymous)]

Well, one of the reasons you shouldn't believe it is that there is a lot of smoke without fire here. For example,

"Isn't that odd? Then there's the analysis by a former high school math teacher named Kathy Dopp, which seems to show that in counties using optical-scan voting systems in Florida, people registered as Democrats voted for Bush at an usually high rate. Did they really mean to do that, or did the voting machines corrupt their votes?"

Of course what Ms. Dopp didn't bother to do was go back and look at how those counties voted in 1996 and 2000. Despite being very heavily Democratic in registration, they went overwhelmingly for Republican candidates in 1996 and 2000 when optical scanners were not being used.

From what I can tell, Palast *vastly* overestimates the number of spoiled ballots in Ohio and then assumes that every spoiled ballot was a vote for Kerry.

The odd thing is that Democrats don't seem to have learned anything from the post-2000 rhetoric on "stolen" elections. The "election was stolen" meme is beneficial to one political party, IMO, and it ain't the Democrats.

[oxlahun.livejournal.com]

Don't take Anonymous' word for it on the Florida vote counts. I worked up some numbers yesterday afternoon. I invite informed criticism, or someone less lazy than me to crunch the other counties.

We all know it was rigged in '00 ...

I hate to pick nits on this, but it looks like the majority of voters don't believe the 2000 election was rigged. So while "we" as in the people who read khaosworks' journal probably all agree with you, it's not a general enough sentiment to effect change without some other concrete evidence. Manjoo's point (and mine, to a lesser extent), is that we don't have the concrete evidence yet.

IAN anything even remotely resembing AL, but my understanding of our judicial system is that in criminal court, the burden of proof is on the prosecution. Even in civil matters, it is biased heavily towards using previously established precedent—it favors the status quo. Please, let's either drop the red herrings and go about finding some exceptional evidence of fraud, or get on the business of preventing as much Bush-inflicted damage (and future fraud) as we can.