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| 5/24 |
| 2004/11/7 [Politics/Domestic/California, Politics/Domestic/Election] UID:34732 Activity:moderate |
11/5 isn't it really weird that where paper ballots were used,
the exit polls were accurate, and where electronic ballots
were used, the exit polls were wildly inaccurate? like
every single time? republicans and stat nerds,
please defend yourself.
\_ I'm not going to defend anyone, but you might find this interesting
http://ustogether.org/election04/florida_vote_patt.htm and
http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm
I don't see obvious evidence of machine based voter fraud, but
I did not really look as carefully as I could have. This site
is nice, though, because it has raw data. If there was fraud, it
should be apparent in these numbers somehow.
\_ Well, what I found odd was that CNN's exit polls moved in
Bush's favor AFTER the election. I'm still scratching my head
about that one. It was a shift of almost 4% in some cases.
\_ Seek knowledge. The exit poll system broke late evening and
didn't get another update until after 1am so they did this
horrible thing: they used the real returns counted from real
votes.
\_ What do you mean? How can you get how many women voted
for Kerry vs men from real returns? Did the final exit
poll results include real returns or not?
\_ It is weird because it isn't true. You saw very early returns
released to the net without any information about where those polls
where taken, how many were polled, nothing. Please take Stat 2
because you continue to spread further misinformation.
\_ Stop smoking the Democratic Underground crack pipe. -liberal |
| 5/24 |
|
| ustogether.org/election04/florida_vote_patt.htm First look at the plot of total number of votes for a party president ver sus the number of voters registered to that party. Here the red and blue are Republican and Democrat, respectively. The Sol id symbols are for counties that Electroincally Vote and the Open Symbol s are for counties that vote on paper. Because the range of precinct si zes is large both axes are show on a logarithmic scale to make detail vi sible. The 45 degree purple line is what you would get if all members of a party voted for their own party o nly. Points that lie abo ve the purple line arise from votes crossing party lines and from indepe ndent voters. When a point lies below the purple line it suggests that votes defecting significantly from the party. It is fairly apparent that in the smaller precincts (lower left part of p lot) the voting pattern curves away from the line indicating either a st rong defection from democrat to republican votes. All the e-voting precints are large (upper right corner). Now we can compare the e-voting behavior with the optical scan voting. F irst note that wih e-voting both red and blue cluster tightly along a st raight line and the expected vote by registration parallels the observed vote. The optical scans show much greater deviation from this tight li ne, but the bulk of the points follow the same line. Notably however th ere is more large defection from this line that hurts the democratic vot e than the republican vote. Now we look at these same effects in another style of plot. In the follo wing we convert from raw votes to percentages. The bottom axis is the p ercentage of registered voters declaring a party (dem or rep). The left axis is the percentage of votes for a given party. For the Optical sca n votes (open symbols) I have scaled their size by the size of the preci nct. The large precincts for both e-voting and optical scan lie on similar trend lines. The smaller precincts show better than expected (from party registration) for the r epublicans and the opposite for the democrats. |
| ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm Explanation of What these numbers are, and how they were calculated: PERCENT CHANGE for DEM, for example, = (Actual DEM Vote - Expected DEM Vo te) / (Expected DEM Vote) This is a simple percent change measure taught in highschool mathematics. EXPECTED_VOTES REP = the percentage of registered REP * the total number of voters who voted in each county on Tuesday. EXPECTED votes would normally vary from the ACTUAL votes due to increased voter turnout by one party, Independents voting REP or DEM or other fac tors. What seems very odd in these numbers is that the increase in ACTUA L votes from EXPECTED votes has a striking pattern of being so much high er for REPs than that for DEMs in counties using optical scan voting mac hines, even when smaller counties are excluded from the analysis. Voters nationally voted along party lines by about 90% and Florida ex it polls favored Kerry. However, no conclusions can yet be drawn from th is data and analyses. Further study is needed of other numerical by coun ty measures for Florida and other states' election results and races. html which neglected to remove smaller counties from the study before doing the analyses and so does not seem to be a valid critique of our a nalyses but is interesting. TruthOUT and Thom Hartman of CommonDreams is covering us. |