Florida Democrats fail to join the dots?
An analysis of registered voters vs actual votes shows a massive disparity in the trends between districts using Marksense voting as opposed to those using E-touch voting machines:
The following table gives a more detailed breakdown of the anomaly. The 2nd and 3rd columns show how many more people voted than would be expected if the breakdown of votes was split by registered voting intentions:
Bush edge over registered Republicans |
Kerry edge over registered Democrats |
Difference (4 main systems charted) |
Total votes |
Total districts |
|
Diebold Marksense |
43.39% |
4.05% |
39.34% |
2,370,297 |
32 |
ES&S Marksense |
50.27% |
-5.13% |
55.40% |
1,039,600 |
19 |
Sequoia Marksense |
220.40% |
-68.40% |
288.80% |
9,955 |
1 |
ES&S E-voting |
26.75% |
26.92% |
-0.17% |
2,445,847 |
11 |
Sequioia E-voting |
31.94% |
25.72% |
6.22% |
1,417,993 |
4 |
Now, what does this all mean?
Maybe the Republicans focused much more on the districts who are much more likely to use Marksense?
That is one possibility but the Republicans would have had to have done a miraculous job in capturing swing and independent voters in those districts yet an equally sloppy job in e-voting districts, where such voters were divided equally among both parties.
News networks' exit polls also showed a Kerry win, despite being subsequently changed to reflect the result.
However, a similar disparity exists in 2000, 38.37% for those states that went to Marksense in 2004 and -12.64% for those that went to E-voting.
Thom Hartmann thinks the vote collecting machines were hacked, although 2 or 3 different systems were used and all reported the same trend.
Some people have pointed out that since 2 separate companies make the optical scanning systems, they are unlikely to be involved in the same fraud. This would be a good argument except for the fact that Diebold's CEO founded ES&S.
Either way, we need a lot more information before we can establish the cause of this disparity.