From Zogby - I Smell a Rat

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Sun, 14 Nov 2004 08:57:46 -0800 (PST)

Subject:From Zogby-I Smell a Rat

 

I Smell a Rat

 

I smell a rat. It has that distinctive and all-too-familiar odor of

the species Republicanus floridius. We got a nasty bite from this pest

four years ago and never quite recovered. Symptoms of a long-term

infection are becoming distressingly apparent.

 

The first sign of the rat was on election night. The jubilation of

early exit polling had given way to rising anxiety as states fell one

by one to the Red Tide. It was getting late in the smoky cellar of a

Prague sports bar where a crowd of expats had gathered. We had been

hoping to go home to bed early, confident of victory. Those hopes had

evaporated in a flurry of early precinct reports from Florida and Ohio.

 

By 3 AM, conversation had died and we were grimly sipping beers and

watching as those two key states seemed to be slipping further and

further to crimson. Suddenly, a friend who had left two hours earlier

rushed in and handed us a printout.

 

" Zogby's calling it for Kerry. " He smacked the sheet decisively.

" Definitely. He's got both Florida and Ohio in the Kerry column. Kerry

only needs one. " Satisfied, we went to bed, confident we would wake

with the world a better place. Victory was at hand.

 

The morning told a different story, of course. No Florida victory for

Kerry--Bush had a decisive margin of nearly 400,000 votes. Ohio was

not even close enough for Kerry to demand that all the votes be

counted. The pollsters had been dead wrong, Bush had four more years

and a powerful mandate. Onward Christian soldiers--next stop, Tehran.

 

Lies, damn lies, and statistics

 

I work with statistics and polling data every day. Something rubbed me

the wrong way. I checked the exit polls for Florida--all wrong. CNN's

results indicated a Kerry win: turnout matched voter registration, and

independents had broken 59% to 41% for Kerry.

 

Polling is an imprecise science. Yet its very imprecision is itself

quantifiable and follows regular patterns. Differences between actual

results and those expected from polling data must be explainable by

identifiable factors if the polling sample is robust enough. With

almost 3.000 respondents in Florida alone, the CNN poll sample was

pretty robust.

 

The first signs of the rat were identified by Kathy Dopp, who

conducted a simple analysis of voter registrations by party in Florida

and compared them to presidential vote results. Basically she

multiplied the total votes cast in a county by the percentage of

voters registered Republican: this gave an expected Republican vote.

She then compared this to the actual result.

 

Her analysis is startling. Certain counties voted for Bush far in

excess of what one would expect based on the share of Republican

registrations in that county. They key phrase is " certain

counties " --there is extraordinary variance between individual

counties. Most counties fall more or less in line with what one would

expect based on the share of Republican registrations, but some differ

wildly.

 

How to explain this incredible variance? Dopp found one over-riding

factor: whether the county used electronic touch-screen voting, or

paper ballots which were optically scanned into a computer. All of

those with touch-screen voting had results relatively in line with her

expected results, while all of those with extreme variance were in

counties with optical scanning.

 

The intimation, clearly, is fraud. Ballots are scanned; results are

fed into precinct computers; these are sent to a county-wide database,

whose results are fed into the statewide electoral totals. At any

point after physical ballots become databases, the system is

vulnerable to external hackers.

 

It seemed too easy, and Dopp's method seemed simplistic. I re-ran the

results using CNN's exit polling data. In each county, I took the

number of registrations and assigned correctional factors based on the

CNN poll to predict turnout among Republicans, Democrats, and

independents. I then used the vote shares from the polls to predict a

likely number of Republican votes per county. I compared this

`expected' Republican vote to the actual Republican vote.

 

The results are shocking. Overall, Bush received 2% fewer votes in

counties with electronic touch-screen voting than expected. In

counties with optical scanning, he received 16% more. This 16% would

not be strange if it were spread across counties more or less evenly.

It is not. In 11 different counties, the `actual' Bush vote was at

least twice higher than the expected vote. 13 counties had Bush vote

tallies 50--100% higher than expected. In one county where 88% of

voters are registered Democrats, Bush got nearly two thirds of the

vote--three times more than predicted by my model.

 

Again, polling can be wrong. It is difficult to believe it can be that

wrong. Fortunately, however, we can test how wrong it would have to be

to give the `actual' result.

 

I tested two alternative scenarios to see how wrong CNN would have to

have been to explain the election result. In the first, I assumed they

had been wildly off the mark in the turnout figures--i.e. far more

Republicans and independents had come out than Democrats. In the

second I assumed the voting shares were completely wrong, and that the

Republicans had been able to massively poach voters from the Democrat

base.

 

In the first scenario, I assumed 90% of Republicans and independents

voted, and the remaining ballots were cast by Democrats. This explains

the result in counties with optical scanning to within 5%. However, in

this scenario Democratic turnout would have been only 51% in the

optical scanning counties--barely exceeding half of Republican

turnout. It also does not solve the enormous problems in individual

counties. 7 counties in this scenario still have actual vote tallies

for Bush that are at least 100% higher than predicted by the model--an

extremely unlikely result.

 

In the second scenario I assumed that Bush had actually got 100% of

the vote from Republicans and 50% from independents (versus CNN

polling results which were 93% and 41% respectively). If this gave

enough votes for Bush to explain the county's results, I left the

amount of Democratic registered voters ballots cast for Bush as they

were predicted by CNN (14% voted for Bush). If this did not explain

the result, I calculated how many Democrats would have to vote for Bush.

 

In 41 of 52 counties, this did not explain the result and Bush must

have gotten more than CNN's predicted 14% of Democratic ballots--not

an unreasonable assumption by itself. However, in 21 counties more

than 50% of Democratic votes would have to have defected to Bush to

account for the county result--in four counties, at least 70% would

have been required. These results are absurdly unlikely.

 

The second rat

 

A previously undiscovered species of rat, Republicanus cuyahogus, has

been found in Ohio. Before the election, I wrote snide letters to a

state legislator for Cuyahoga county who, according to media reports,

was preparing an army of enforcers to keep `suspect' (read: minority)

voters away from the polls. One of his assistants wrote me back very

pleasant mails to the effect that they had no intention of trying to

suppress voter turnout, and in fact only wanted to encourage people to

vote.

 

They did their job too well. According to the official statistics for

Cuyahoga county, a number of precincts had voter turnout well above

the national average: in fact, turnout was well over 100% of

registered voters, and in several cases well above the total number of

people who have lived in the precinct in the last century or so.

 

In 30 precincts, more ballots were cast than voters were registered in

the county. According to county regulations, voters must cast their

ballot in the precinct in which they are registered. Yet in these

thirty precincts, nearly 100.000 more people voted than are registered

to vote -- this out of a total of 251.946 registrations. These are not

marginal differences--this is a 39% over-vote. In some precincts the

over-vote was well over 100%. One precinct with 558 registered voters

cast nearly 9,000 ballots. As one astute observer noted, it's the

ballot-box equivalent of Jesus' miracle of the fishes. Bush being such

a man of God, perhaps we should not be surprised.

 

What to do?

 

This is not an idle statistical exercise. Either the raw data from two

critical battleground states is completely erroneous, or something has

gone horribly awry in our electoral system--again. Like many

Americans, I was dissatisfied with and suspicious of the way the

Florida recount was resolved in 2000. But at the same time, I was

convinced of one thing: we must let the system work, and accept its

result, no matter how unjust it might appear.

 

With this acceptance, we placed our implicit faith in the Bush

Administration that it would not abuse its position: that it would

recognize its fragile mandate for what it was, respect the will of the

majority of people who voted against them, and move to build consensus

wherever possible and effect change cautiously when needed. Above all,

we believed that both Democrats and Republicans would recognize the

over-riding importance of revitalizing the integrity of the electoral

system and healing the bruised faith of both constituencies.

 

This faith has been shattered. Bush has not led the nation to unity,

but ruled through fear and division. Dishonesty and deceit in areas

critical to the public interest have been the hallmark of his

Administration. I state this not to throw gratuitous insults, but to

place the Florida and Ohio electoral results in their proper context.

For the GOP to claim now that we must take anything on faith, let

alone astonishingly suspicious results in a hard-fought and

extraordinarily bitter election, is pure fantasy. It does not even

merit discussion.

 

The facts as I see them now defy all logical explanations save

one--massive and systematic vote fraud. We cannot accept the result of

the 2004 presidential election as legitimate until these discrepancies

are rigorously and completely explained. From the Valerie Plame case

to the horrors of Abu Ghraib, George Bush has been reluctant to seek

answers and assign accountability when it does not suit his purposes.

But this is one time when no American should accept not getting a

straight answer. Until then, George Bush is still, and will remain,

the `Accidental President' of 2000. One of his many enduring and

shameful legacies will be that of seizing power through two

illegitimate elections conducted on his brother's watch, and

engineering a fundamental corruption at the very heart of the greatest

democracy the world has known. We must not permit this to happen again.

 

(11/12/2004)

- By Colin Shea, The Freezer Box

 

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