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Sacramento Bee Columnist Daniel Weintraub

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November 19, 2004

E-voting in Florida

I got this email from a critic of the Berkeley study on Florida e-voting. It raises some interesting points:

I have just read through the UC Berkeley paper you linked about e-voting. There is a pretty significant pair of errors in it.

The assumption is made (but never disclosed) that in an honest election, e-voting patterns would mirror those of paper voting. But in fact, there is no way to know this. For example, marginal Democratic voters -- and since the error they purport to find is about 2.5%, we are talking about the margins -- in the Democratic counties could well be older retirees from New York and more frightened by electronic voting, while Republican voters in those Democratic counties could be younger and actually attracted by e-voting; even younger Democratic voters could have been more moved by 9/11 than older Democrats, and might also be less afraid of e-voting.

The second assumption is that if there is an actual discrepency between the results as obtained by the e-voting=1 model (use of electronic voting machines) and the e-vote=0 model (no e-voting), that the correct way to interpret this is that there were between 130,000 and 260,000 "excess votes" for Bush. But mathematically, it's equally valid to suppose that there was a Republican suppression factor in the 2000 and 1996 elections -- that is, that the Democrats cheated in counting punchcards in heavily Democratic districts in past elections -- which they were unable to do in 2004 with the electronic voting machines.

In fact, it is easier to cheat with punch cards: for one easy example, if you take a stack of ballots and push a long stylus through the "Gore" hole, this will have the effect of turning Bush votes into uncountable Bush and Gore double votes, while leaving Gore votes undisturbed. This requires no computer sophistication at all (or even a high-school diploma) and can be done by the lowest level of poll worker, long before the cards even leave the individual precinct.

All that the study actually found was that Bush's support in Democratic counties of Florida increased more than the level one would have expected from projecting Republican support in 1996 and 2000, and that this increase seems correlated to electronic voting. It does not and cannot tell us whether those "excess" votes are in fact legitimate or a result of fraud... for all that the authors pretend that's what they have found.

Rick Hasen at the Election Law blog has some additional analysis of this at his site.