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UC Berkeley Research Team Sounds 'Smoke Alarm' for Florida E-Vote Count
Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 06/04/2005 - 2:48pm.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NOVEMBER 18, 2004
1:01 PM
CONTACT: University of California's Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team
Erin Reasoner/Eastwick Communications 650-480-4057
erin.reasoner@eastwick.com
Erica Pereira/Eastwick Communications 640-480-4024
erica@eastwick.com
Noel Gallagher/ UC Berkeley Media Relations 510-643-7944
noelgallagher@berkeley.edu
UC Berkeley Research Team Sounds 'Smoke Alarm' for Florida E-Vote Count
Statistical Analysis - the Sole Method for Tracking E-Voting - Shows Irregularities May Have Awarded 130,000 - 260,000 or More Excess Votes to Bush in Florida
Research Team Calls for Investigation
BERKELEY, CA -- November 18 -- 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 .
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Mystery Pollster on UC Berkeley Report
http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/11/the_ucal_berkle.html
November 18, 2004
The UCal Berkeley Report
First, one point I should have made more clearly in previous posts: The absence of significant evidence of fraud in exit polls does not prove the absence of fraud. When Warren Mitofsky says he sees no greater deviations for any particular type of voting equipment, he means he sees no differences big enough or widespread enough to be statistically meaningful. If vote fraud occurred in just a few counties in one state, the exit polls may have lacked the statistical power to detect it. That lack of power is what statisticians call “Type II Error.â€
Which brings me to the U.Cal Berkeley report, (now available here – you need to scroll down to the link, “The Effect of Electronic Voting…).†The first thing to understand about the report, in the context of my recent posts, is that has nothing to say about exit polls. It depends in instead on a statistical analysis of county level voting patterns.
“Observer,†a commenter on my last post, made that point and also did a nice summary of the report's findings:
They are using multivariate linear regressions to explain voting patterns in Florida, and are finding a very statistically significant correlation between the presence of electronic voting and a higher percentage for Bush.
The paper has undergone some peer review prior to publication. It mentions two concerns that were raised about the methodology, and shows that when those concerns were addressed the findings did not change substantially.
Of course, now that the paper has been released on Internet it will be subject to a much wider review by others with far more expertise in statistical modeling than I can offer.
For now, just keep in mind that is possible that the Berkeley report detected a discrepancy that the Florida exit poll missed, given the size of the discrepancy and the number of precincts sampled. It is also possible that the full report on the Florida exit poll will contradict the Berkeley finding. Once again, without more specific data from NEP, we really cannot say for sure.