Reply #38: FreePress: Hacking the vote in Miami County

[dzika]

Hacking the vote in Miami County
by Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D.
December 25, 2004

On Election Night, when 100% of the precincts in Miami County had reported, only 31,620 votes had been counted. George W. Bush was reported to have won Miami County with 20,807 votes (65.80%) to 10,724 votes (33.92%) for John F. Kerry. These numbers did seem low. In 2000 there had been 42,841 ballots cast. Bush had won Miami County with 26,037 votes (60.78%) to 15,584 votes (36.38%) for Al Gore.

Somehow the final total came in later that night at 50,235 votes cast, giving Bush a margin of 16,000 votes, exactly – 33,039 to 17,039. Moreover, as has been widely reported, even with the addition of 18,615 new votes, Bush's percentage was almost unchanged (65.80% to 65.77%), and Kerry's percentage was exactly the same (33.92%). This led some observers to believe that the optical scanner had been programmed to come out that way, to provide the desired 16,000-vote plurality.

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Now the 1,609 provisional ballots have been examined, 1,542 of them have been counted, and the results have been certified. Bush now claims victory in Miami County with 34,005 votes (65.68%) to 17,611 votes (34.01%) for Kerry. Officially there were 51,777 votes counted for president, an increase of 20.86% over the 2000 presidential vote total.

This represents an astonishing increase in voter turnout. The population of Miami County is reported to have grown from 98,868 to 100,230 since the 2000 census, an increase of only 1.38%. The number of registered voters has risen from 66,765 in 2000 to 72,169 in 2004, an increase of 8.09%.

How did the Republicans do it? To answer this question I have compared, on a precinct by precinct basis, the presidential vote totals for 2004 with those of 2000. Since turnout was key to Bush’s impressive margin in Miami County, I have organized the data according to voter turnout.

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http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1038