Working on this new server in php7...
imc indymedia

Los Angeles Indymedia : Activist News

white themeblack themered themetheme help
About Us Contact Us Calendar Publish RSS
Features
latest news
best of news
syndication
commentary


KILLRADIO

VozMob

ABCF LA

A-Infos Radio

Indymedia On Air

Dope-X-Resistance-LA List

LAAMN List




IMC Network:

Original Cities

www.indymedia.org africa: ambazonia canarias estrecho / madiaq kenya nigeria south africa canada: hamilton london, ontario maritimes montreal ontario ottawa quebec thunder bay vancouver victoria windsor winnipeg east asia: burma jakarta japan korea manila qc europe: abruzzo alacant andorra antwerpen armenia athens austria barcelona belarus belgium belgrade bristol brussels bulgaria calabria croatia cyprus emilia-romagna estrecho / madiaq euskal herria galiza germany grenoble hungary ireland istanbul italy la plana liege liguria lille linksunten lombardia london madrid malta marseille nantes napoli netherlands nice northern england norway oost-vlaanderen paris/Île-de-france patras piemonte poland portugal roma romania russia saint-petersburg scotland sverige switzerland thessaloniki torun toscana toulouse ukraine united kingdom valencia latin america: argentina bolivia chiapas chile chile sur cmi brasil colombia ecuador mexico peru puerto rico qollasuyu rosario santiago tijuana uruguay valparaiso venezuela venezuela oceania: adelaide aotearoa brisbane burma darwin jakarta manila melbourne perth qc sydney south asia: india mumbai united states: arizona arkansas asheville atlanta austin baltimore big muddy binghamton boston buffalo charlottesville chicago cleveland colorado columbus dc hawaii houston hudson mohawk kansas city la madison maine miami michigan milwaukee minneapolis/st. paul new hampshire new jersey new mexico new orleans north carolina north texas nyc oklahoma philadelphia pittsburgh portland richmond rochester rogue valley saint louis san diego san francisco san francisco bay area santa barbara santa cruz, ca sarasota seattle tampa bay tennessee urbana-champaign vermont western mass worcester west asia: armenia beirut israel palestine process: fbi/legal updates mailing lists process & imc docs tech volunteer projects: print radio satellite tv video regions: oceania united states topics: biotech

Surviving Cities

www.indymedia.org africa: canada: quebec east asia: japan europe: athens barcelona belgium bristol brussels cyprus germany grenoble ireland istanbul lille linksunten nantes netherlands norway portugal united kingdom latin america: argentina cmi brasil rosario oceania: aotearoa united states: austin big muddy binghamton boston chicago columbus la michigan nyc portland rochester saint louis san diego san francisco bay area santa cruz, ca tennessee urbana-champaign worcester west asia: palestine process: fbi/legal updates process & imc docs projects: radio satellite tv
printable version - js reader version - view hidden posts - tags and related articles


View article without comments

VOTERGATE! Suppression in Ohio, and the best evidence yet in Florida

by Bill Simpich Sunday, Nov. 21, 2004 at 8:01 PM
lawland@pacbell.net

A neutral body must conduct the recount - not Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State. Meanwhile, a well-vetted study from a reputable UC Berkeley research team has found that electronic voting machines in Florida apparently mistallied hundreds of thousands of votes.


A neutral body must conduct the recount - not Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State

A presidential recount will happen in Ohio. Green candidate David Cobb and Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik have requested it and raised the money. (http://www.votecobb.org)
Thousands of volunteers from Ohio and nationwide are sought as observers. 70% of Ohio’s votes are by punch cards, which historically disenfranchise African Americans and people of color. Ralph Nader is doing the same in 11 selected precincts in New Hampshire that used Diebold optical scanners and the percentages favor Bush by 5-15% higher than normal.

Ohio has been the center of voter suppression tactics, with Columbus and the surrounding Franklin County as ground zero. Bob Fithrakis of the Columbus Free Press (http://www.freepress.org) reports that the Republican elections director held back voting machines to African American precincts and dispersed many of the other machines to affluent suburbs in Franklin County.

Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell (co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign) must be taken off the count. Among other stunts, Blackwell has attempted to destroy thousands of new voter registrations because they were not printed on the “proper” 80-pound card stock. Three dozen “caging lists” (http://www.gregpalast.com) reveal spreadsheets listing names and addresses of voters to be blocked on any pretext. Every single address was in African American majority precincts.

More than 700 attended public hearings near Columbus on November 13 and 15, offering testimony of too few machines, standing in line for many hours, and cars being towed from a polling site. Similar tactics were used throughout the state, including Kenyon College. As one student said, “We don’t want praise. We want people to know how angry we are.”

A well-vetted study from a reputable UC Berkeley research team has found that electronic voting machines in Florida apparently mistallied hundreds of thousands of votes

The aforementioned hearings were held at the New Life Church, the location of the polling station in the Republican suburb of Gahanna where a faulty electronic voting machine cartridge tabulated 4000 extra votes for President Bush. The race is on to find out how many similar errors have occurred in Ohio or elsewhere before the Electoral College meets on December 13. www (at) blackboxvoting.org is vote auditing in Ohio and elsewhere.

The best evidence came out on November 18, when a team of UC Berkeley researchers led by Professor Michael Hout (a member of the National Academy of Sciences) found evidence that electronic-voting counties in Florida could have mistakenly awarded up to 260,000 votes to President George Bush (their press release is attached below). The UC Berkeley team found that President Bush received tens of thousands more votes in electronic-voting Democratic counties than past voting patterns would have suggested. Although the study was not peer-reviewed, seven professors proofread the study and agreed with the conclusions. No such pattern turned up in counties using optical scanning machines.

The Contra Costa Tri-Valley Herald wrote that: “A reputable MIT political scientist succeeded in replicating the analysis Thursday at the request of the Herald and The Associated Press. He said an investigation is warranted. "There is an interesting pattern here that I hope someone looks into," said MIT Arts and Social Sciences Dean Charles Stewart III, a researcher in the MIT-Caltech Voting Technology Project. " See http://www.trivalleyherald.com/Stories/0,1413,86~10669~2545298,00.html

Andrew Beveridge (andy (at) troll.soc.qc.edu), a sociology professor at Queens College and a consultant to the New York Times, spoke highly of Michael Hout, saying he was someone whose work has to be taken seriously. He described the Berkeley study as highly professional and said "the paper is quite disturbing." He said it "really raises the issue — we don't know what's going on" in electronic voting machines. "This kind of analysis is exactly why we need more analysis and a paper trail."

Earlier studies have focused on the released exit polls. Former MIT professor David Anick finds that the odds of Bush making an average gain of 4.15% in each one of the 16 states included in the media’s 4 pm exit polling is one in 50,000. (www (at) bluelemur.org, Nov. 8) U. Penn professor Steve Freeman calculates 250 million to one. (www (at) ilcaonline.freeman.pdf) Activists call for the release of the full exit polling for all states by county, as the above data is the only data made public by the networks (who own it). County exit polls would be the best evidence in testing for fraud.


UC Berkeley Research team: Florida E-Voting Machines Mistallied 130,000+ Votes to Bush
by UC Berkeley Thursday, Nov. 18, 2004 at 10:46 AM

Today, the University of California's Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team released a statistical study - the sole method available to monitor the accuracy of e- voting - reporting irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election

Today the University of California's Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team released a statistical study - the sole method available to monitor the accuracy of e- voting - reporting irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods - what the team says can be deemed a "smoke alarm." Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance - the probability is less than 0.1 percent. The research team formally disclosed results of the study at a press conference today at the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center, where they called on Florida voting officials to investigate.

The three counties where the voting anomalies were most prevalent were also the most heavily Democratic: Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, respectively. Statistical patterns in counties that did not have e-touch voting machines predict a 28,000 vote decrease in President Bush's support in Broward County; machines tallied an increase of 51,000 votes - a net gain of 81,000 for the incumbent. President Bush should have lost 8,900 votes in Palm Beach County, but instead gained 41,000 - a difference of 49,900. He should have gained only 18,400 votes in Miami-Dade County but saw a gain of 37,000 - a difference of 19,300 votes.

"For the sake of all future elections involving electronic voting - someone must investigate and explain the statistical anomalies in Florida," says Professor Michael Hout. "We're calling on voting officials in Florida to take action."

The research team is comprised of doctoral students and faculty in the UC Berkeley sociology department, and led by Sociology Professor Michael Hout, a nationally-known expert on statistical methods and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center.

For its research, the team used multiple-regression analysis, a statistical method widely used in the social and physical sciences to distinguish the individual effects of many variables on quantitative outcomes like vote totals. This multiple-regression analysis takes into account of the following variables by county:

* number of voters
* median income
* Hispanic/Latino population
* change in voter turnout between 2000 and 2004
* support for Senator Dole in the 1996 election
* support for President Bush in the 2000 election.
* use of electronic voting or paper ballots


"No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained," said Hout. "The study shows, that a county's use of electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this appearing in a population where the true difference is zero - less than once in a thousand chances."

The data used in this study came from public sources including CNN.com, the 2000 US Census, and the Verified Voting Foundation. For a copy of the working paper, raw data and other information used in the study can be found at: http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/.
Report this post as:
Share on: Twitter, Facebook, Google+

add your comments


Simple

by Simple Simon Sunday, Nov. 21, 2004 at 9:50 PM

3.5 million vote majority.

Your guy lost.

Get over it.
Report this post as:
Share on: Twitter, Facebook, Google+

add your comments


Wrong, Simple

by Meyer London Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2004 at 3:56 PM

As Gore learned in 2000, it is the electoral vote that counts. That is why it is very important to do a recount in Ohio, which is not a typical red state (it is filled with big cities) and in which thousands of protests of vote fraud have been raised.
Report this post as:
Share on: Twitter, Facebook, Google+

add your comments


all close states should be recounted

by more rational Wednesday, Nov. 24, 2004 at 3:27 AM

It should just be done as a matter of course, for a lot of reasons.

It's no different than counting the cash register receipts twice, or scoring a test twice when the grade is on the border between a B and and A. You do it to increase confidence in your numbers.

Discrepancies between exit polls and results can, and must be evaluated as well. This is *necessary* so that future exit polling can be adjusted for whatever factors led to the current discrepancies.

Twice already, Democrats have backed off from demanding recounts, because they are too chicken to explain to the average joe that they are not being pains in the asses, but just making sure the counts are accurate.
Report this post as:
Share on: Twitter, Facebook, Google+

add your comments


I don't think the exit polls are the problem

by Sheepdog Wednesday, Nov. 24, 2004 at 6:27 AM

-" future exit polling can be adjusted for whatever factors led to the current discrepancies."-

They only began to err when manipulations occur in the counting process. Exit polling is an old and refined method of survey done by professionals in this type of information gathering.
Report this post as:
Share on: Twitter, Facebook, Google+

add your comments


Just too delicious

by Scrumptious Head Saturday, Dec. 04, 2004 at 4:12 PM

Weeeeeee.

My guy won, your guy lost.

Na na na na,
na na na na!
Heyyyy
Goodbye!
Report this post as:
Share on: Twitter, Facebook, Google+

add your comments


Simple

by Simple Simon Thursday, Dec. 09, 2004 at 2:50 AM

Ouch. This has got to hurt.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041206/ap_on_el_pr/ohio_vote

Ohio Certifies Bush Win by 119,000 Votes

Oh golly.

Hey, let's have a nationwide recount, shall we kids? Just for fun?

He he he.
Report this post as:
Share on: Twitter, Facebook, Google+

add your comments


exit polling

by more rational Thursday, Dec. 09, 2004 at 3:09 AM

We can't know what really happened until we examine all the data.

There are always going to be some minor, and occasionally some major deviations from the expected counts. Whenever the major deviations occur, we should look at the data.

It could be that there were some differences that threw the exit polls off. It could be anything from fraud... to overrepresentation of data samples that favored Kerry. Maybe it was both.

I put 95% of the blame at the feet of the Democrats. They're being played by the DLC. Lefitsts and progressives are doing the right thing, again.
Report this post as:
Share on: Twitter, Facebook, Google+

add your comments


OneEyedMan

by KPC Thursday, Dec. 09, 2004 at 5:10 PM
KPC

...what kinda stunted eunuch gurgles "he he he" when he laughs...

...fuckin' flacid fuck...seems like your the one still cheering about a game already over for a season just past. The new game is called 'undermine at any costs"....I am sure you remember how that game is played, don't you my good little doggie...

...now FETCH!
Report this post as:
Share on: Twitter, Facebook, Google+

add your comments


Hey One-Eyed -

by ARcollegeGirl Wednesday, Dec. 15, 2004 at 4:48 PM

will you marry me? You seem to have everything I'm looking for.

Report this post as:
Share on: Twitter, Facebook, Google+

add your comments


© 2000-2018 Los Angeles Independent Media Center. Unless otherwise stated by the author, all content is free for non-commercial reuse, reprint, and rebroadcast, on the net and elsewhere. Opinions are those of the contributors and are not necessarily endorsed by the Los Angeles Independent Media Center. Running sf-active v0.9.4 Disclaimer | Privacy