Folks are looking at the data and finding a few wierd things where Diebold machines were... admittedly a partisan article, but the numbers are interesting. ___________ Tulare county votes look wrong by Faun Otter All the President's Voting Machines - Diebold strike again? I always wondered if a background in boring statistical analysis might ever come in handy. Well take a look at what I found amongst California's voting data, as supplied by their secretary of state. Tulare county use Diebold Opti-Scan equipment. Tulare county gave 'obscure' candidates very high percents of their state wide totals: Palmieri - 995 out of 3,717 26.77% Platform was 'don't vote for me or the recall'. Gay Rights activist who lives in LA. Kunzman - 694 out of 2,133 32.54% Lives north of Oakland and favored increased social programs. Said he would fire all school custodians tosave money and have the kids empty the trash and clean the carpets. Sprague - 546 out of 1,576 34.64% Zero tolerance for discrimination. Lives near Sacramento McClain - 46 out of 2,463 1.77% Civil engineer, Berkley grad living in Bay Area These were not local candidates. The 'local candidate effect' can be seen with Doctor Macaluso from Visalia in Tulare county. He got 7.2% of his state wide total vote from his home county. As a percentage of the votes counted as of the time I ran this analysis, Tulare votes were 0.9% of the state total. For comparison, in the 2002 fall election, the county gave Bustamante 24,647 votes which has dropped to 15,487 even with an increase in votes cast from 61,884 to 68,891. Stats can never prove anything but these absurd figures are strong evidence for an audit. The county gave leaders the following percentages of their state wide totals: Swartzenegger 1.028% Bustamante 0.65% McLintock 1.036% Camejo 0.25% These figures suggest a possible scam in which the machines were used to skim Bustamante votes to 'fringe' candidates. That would leave the % for Swartzenegger close to that predicted by opinion polls and exit polls but decrease Bustamante's total. I am now running similar tests on every county where Diebold were doing their best to deliver the votes to George Bush - to paraphrase Wally O'Dell, their CEO. Alameda's touch screens did something rather odd. A reasonable distribution of votes by candidate by county has a long thin tail, often ending with several candidates getting NO VOTES. The touch screens of Alameda seem to have managed to find a good number of votes for all sorts of people at the bottom edge of the ballot. Funny coincidence that Alameda has suddenly taken a dislike to Bustmante after giving him 62% of their vote for Lt. Governor last year, he is down to barely 50% of the total. More later as I crunch the numbers. If you care to check my figures, go to the CA secretary of state's site for the raw data.
