Voting irregularities in three Florida counties that
used electronic voting machines may have awarded as many as 130,000
votes to president George Bush in the US presidential election,
according to researchers at the University of California,
Berkeley.
The researchers claimed that their findings raise questions
about the accuracy of voting results in Broward, Palm Beach and
Miami-Dade counties, all of which have more voters registered as
Democrats than Republicans.
According to statistical models, voters in those three counties
delivered more than 130,000 votes to Bush than were expected by a
post-election analysis, the researchers maintain.
"Something went awry with electronic voting in Florida," said
Michael Hout, a sociology professor, who led the research
effort.
Hout said that the odds of the Florida irregularities happening by
chance were less than one in 1,000 and he called for an examination
of the results.
"It is like a smoke alarm and it is beeping," he said. "We call
upon the voting officials in Florida to determine whether there is
a fire."
The irregularities did not account for enough votes to give the
state to Democratic challenger John Kerry, who lost to Bush in
Florida by more than 377,000 votes.
To obtain their results, the Berkeley researchers analysed
publicly available voting data from all Florida's counties using a
technique called multiple-regression analysis, which accurately
identified butterfly ballot problems in Palm Beach County during
the 2000 election, Hout said.
The technique involves building a statistical model to predict
voting patterns based on a number of factors, including history of
voting, median family income, age and race. Hout's team conducted
their study using data compiled from the 2 November election.
"We noticed that three counties stood out from those
expectations," Hout said. "These were counties that had a
significant departure from what we would expect, statistically,
given the patterns in all those other counties."
Using their statistical model, Hout's team forecast that Bush
should have received 28,000 fewer votes in Broward County than he
received there in 2000. However, Bush received 51,000 more votes
than he did four years ago.
In Palm Beach County, where Bush gained 41,000 votes,
the research suggested a loss of 8,900 votes. For Miami-Dade County
the research showed Bush should have gained 18,400 votes. In fact,
he gained 37,000 votes.
The counties in question used e-voting machines manufactured by
Election Systems & Software and Sequoia Voting Systems.
The model found an even larger discrepancy when certain factors
weighing the data in Bush's favour were removed, Hout said.
However, the team did not find this level of irregularity in 12
other Florida counties that used e-voting machines, he said.
Hout was unable to explain why some e-voting counties would
experience irregularities while others did not, but he said that
the irregularities were more likely to occur in counties that voted
for Democratic candidate Al Gore in 2000.
"This becomes an important clue that investigators who know
something about both the software and the hardware can use," he
said.
The Berkeley study also appeared to debunk speculation about
voting irregularities in several heavily Democratic counties that
voted Republican in the 2004 election.
After applying the statistical model to Dixie County and Baker
County, both of which bucked party affiliations and voted
overwhelmingly for Bush, Hout's team found nothing amiss. These
counties, which used paper ballots that were optically scanned,
have historically voted Republican in national elections, Hout
said.
Hout's researchers also examined the election results in the
hotly contested state of Ohio and found no irregularities there.
"Our results do indicate that Ohio probably did get it right," Hout
said.
A spokesman for the Information Technology Association of
America (ITAA), an IT supplier group, dismissed the results, saying
that the study appeared to ignore the political, social and
economic factors that affected the vote.
"It is unclear to us that the technology, which is the one
factor the authors appear to have focused on for this study, should
be viewed as causal above the many other factors that could affect
a voter's decision," said ITAA spokesman Charles Greenwald.
Greenwald also criticised the study for not being peer
reviewed.
The Berkeley research has already been informally reviewed by
academics at Harvard University, and will no doubt be scrutinised
now that the results are posted on Berkeley's website, Hout
said.
He declined to provide the names of researchers outside of
Berkeley who were familiar with the results, saying they asked not
to be identified. The results can be found at
http://ucdata.berkeley.edu
Because there is no paper audit trail for the e-voting machines
used in Florida, it may be difficult to ultimately explain the
irregularities.
"Our statistical approach is just about the only way we have to
uncover what went on in Florida or in any other state that uses
e-voting as it exists today, except Nevada where there is a paper
trail," Hout said.
Robert McMillan writes for IDG News Service