155446> Tue Nov-30-04 02:09 AM Original message

Miami Herald article shows that Kerry may have won Florida!

Edited on Tue Nov-30-04 02:18 AM by pointsoflight

In an article published yesterday, reporters from the Miami Herald provided data from hand counts that they conducted in several northern "dixiecrat" counties in Florida. They concluded that nothing was awry, and in fact, went so far as to title the article "No flaw in Bush's state win." Here's a link to a reprint of the story that doesn't require registration: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/20021... <http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002102809_florida28.html> Here are the tallies for Union County: Bush original: 3396 Bush hand count: 3393 (-3) Kerry original: 1251 Kerry hand count: 1272 (+21) Net change: Kerry +24 Here are the tallies for Lafayette County: Bush original: 2460 Bush hand count: 2452 (-8) Kerry original: 845 Kerry hand count: 848 (+3) Net change: Kerry +11 It's a bit more complicated for the third county they looked at, Suwanee County, because they only report the totals for a hand count of "almost 60%" of the ballots. Bush original: 11153 Kerry original: 4522 Bush hand count: 6140 Kerry hand count: 2984 In the original count, 71.2% of the votes cast for Bush or Kerry (n=15675) went to Bush. In the hand count, this drops to 67.3%. That is a significant drop. Let's translate that into numbers. If you take the percentages from the hand count and extrapolate, here's what you get: Bush = 15675 x .673 = 10549 (loss of 604) Kerry = 15675 x .327 = 5126 (gain of 604) Net change: Kerry +1208 A switch of 1208 votes in a county with less than 16K votes cast is obviously huge. Now maybe there's a very large percentage of Bush votes in that remaining 40% that they didn't count, but we can't know that because they didn't count them. Which begs the question...why did they stop counting in Suwannee County when their tabulation of 60% of the ballots deviated so much from the original total? And without actually counting those remaining ballots, how can they possibly report that nothing is amiss when the data they have so far suggests a possible problem? They conclude that there's "no flaw in Bush's state win." Sorry, but what I see is a possible gain of 1243 votes for Kerry from three small counties in which only 23627 ballots were cast. That represents about 0.3% of the ballots cast for Bush and Kerry statewide. If Kerry gained votes at the same rate statewide, he picks up nearly 400,000 votes and wins Florida. Thanks Miami Herald, you just revealed to us in your hand counts that there's a possibility that Kerry won Florida.