TOTAL INFORMATION ANALYSIS

Wednesday, February 04, 2004

Martin Bento has run the numbers and found that John Forbes Kerry (Skull & Bones 1966) had a distinct bounce in New Hampshire counties where ballots are counted by machine rather than by hand:

In the New Hampshire Democratic Primary, exit polls, which are seldom far wrong, indicated a very close race. The final vote was not close. A close race would have constituted a win for Dean, given expectations. There is serious reason to be dubious of computerized vote counting systems (see Verified Voting or Black Box Voting for details). . . . According to the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s office there are three possibilities:
... counted by Diebold machines.
... counted by ES&S machines.
... counted by hand.

These are optical-scan systems, where the voter marks a paper ballot that is subsequently counted by computer. There is, then, the possibility of a recount, but only if the issue is forced, since the election was not considered close enough to mandate an automatic recount. Given the problems demonstrated with Diebold systems and the serious allegations made against ES&S, perhaps such a recount should be pursued. In any case, here are the vote totals and percentages for the big five candidates, grouped by vote tallying method (percentages are percentages of the big five vote, i.e., it does not include the minor candidates)).

Tech	Kerry	Kperc	Dean	Dperc	Edwards	Eperc	Clark	Cperc	Lieberman	Lperc
Diebold	59421	40.1%	37589	25.4%	18334	12.4%	19119	12.9%	13549	9.2%
ES&S	5952	37.6%	4415	27.9%	1877	11.8%	2076	13.1%	1516	9.6%
Hand	19004	34.9%	18148	33.3%	6276	11.5%	7217	13.2%	3846	7.1%

To bring the matter into sharper focus, here are the percentages by which Kerry’s vote exceeded Dean’s, grouped by tallying method.

VotingTechUsed	% Margin
Diebold	58.1%
ES&S	35.0%
Hand	4.7%



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| Posted at 03:21 | PERMA-LINK |

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