So some UC Berkley researchers did a statistical analysis of voting patterns in Florida for the 2004 election. As they point out, how else are you supposed to check the results of a paperless election? The results, as they publish in
Working Paper: The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections (10 page PDF) are quite interesting.

I do believe that it is entirely possible that in a completely verified tally of every American’s vote in 2004, it would be totally possible that Bush would still come out ahead. But, well, we didn’t have a verified result, or even a verifiable or recountable result in many cases. This is a perfect setup for corruption, and the results are coming in.

And before you say, well the Democrats cheat too (probably true) look at the ownership of the companies making and supplying the technology used in electronic voting. Wealthy. Business owners. Republicans not afraid to publicly state their support and intention of delivering the election for Bush.

And then there were the results from November 2, 2004. Nuff said.

From Summary of findings:

The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections

Summary:
– Irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000 excess votes or more to President George W. Bush in Florida.
– Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for President Bush between 2000 and 2004. This effect cannot be explained by differences between counties in income, number of voters, change in voter turnout, or size of Hispanic/Latino population.
– In Broward County alone, President Bush appears to have received approximately 72,000 excess votes.
– We can be 99.9% sure that these effects are not attributable to chance.

Details:
Because many factors impact voting results, statistical tools are necessary to see the effect of touch-screen voting. Multiple- regression analysis is a statistical technique widely used in the social and physical sciences to distinguish the individual effects of many variables.

This multiple-regression analysis takes account of the following variables by county: – number of voters – median income – Hispanic population – change in voter turnout between 2000 and 2004 – support for President Bush in 2000 election – support for Dole in 1996 election

When one controls for these factors, the association between electronic voting and increased support for President Bush is impossible to overlook. The data show with 99.0% certainty that a county’s use of electronic voting is associated with a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush.

The data used in this study come from CNN.com, the 2000 US Census, the Florida Department of State, and the Verified Voting Foundation – all publicly available sources. This study was carried out by a group of doctoral students in the UC Berkeley sociology department in collaboration with Professor Michael Hout, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center.

Download and read the paper at UC DATA Home Page. You can also view their raw stats.

Fan-fucking-tastic. Oh, and I guess it’s off to Iran for some more BOMBAGE and DESTRUCTION! FUCK YEAH!

(Via /.)