We Are Shocked, Shocked to Find Voter Fraud in Florida!

In a press conference today, researchers at UC Berkeley (my alma mater) say the chances of electronic voting in large, heavily Democratic Florida counties being accurate are 1 in 1000. These anomalies may have accounted for a surplus of 130K to 260K votes for Bush in Florida. (FYI, these are counties using touchscreen machines, which cannot be manually recounted.) The researchers are being cautious and calling this a 'Smoke Alarm' -- in other words, they believe there's a fire in Florida, but they can't say what caused it or how to put it out.

What's interesting is that the UC researchers set out to debunk claims made by others that the numbers in Florida did not make sense -- largely in the Op Scan counties. And while they didn't find anything statistically odd about those results, they apparently stumbled onto this finding.

This is big. Or at least, it should be big. So far, I've found one story from The Moderate Independent. Here's a quote from it:

“We can be 99.9% sure that these effects are not attributable to chance,” the report says. “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 Hispanic/Latino population.”

“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,” according to the report.

Says Professor Michael Stout, who headed up the UC Berkeley research team behind the report: "Something went awry with the voting in Florida."

Uh huh. Now we need to get the Media to start listening.