Reply #34: Florida - the Miami Herald recount.

[sunshinekathy]

I wonder why the Miami Herald recount of 2.6 opscan counties never made headlines.

While it is not a valid calculation necessarily, if the number of changed votes that shifted from Bush to Kerry in the recount of the 2.6 counties that the Miami Herald chose to recount had been extrapolated based on population proportion, to the rest of Florida, the shift in votes would have come very close to shifting enough votes to change the FL results to a Kerry win.

In addition the counties that the Miami Herald selected were not counties with the highest likelihood of vote count errors.

The huge problem of course, is that there is no way of recounting the DRE touchscreen voting machine counties.

The biggest push in FL should be for local Dems to run for the position of local Election Officials, but then how does one win an election that is counted using possibly rigged touchscreen voting machines?

The only answer may lie with a complete mathematical study using demographics of the entire 2004 election in every state. Such a study is almost complete for New Mexico and the results there may make a real splash as far as the correlation between high rates of "undervotes" (ballots for which no candidate was recorded) in the presidential race in precincts using DRE electronic style voting machines.

There is a lot of hard work involved and we will need many volunteers to help, in order to collect the detailed data we need to study all 2004 election results so that patterns between states can be compared.

Please join our effort by going to http://uscountvotes.org and sign up for our main email announcement list or any of the state lists where you have some time to help wrest detailed data from state and county election officials:

http://uscountvotes.org/fairelection/statesubscribe.html

Perhaps we can all get ready to do this analyses much more quickly by 2006.

Regards,

Kathy Dopp
http://uscountvotes.org