SCOOP EDITOR'S INTRODUCTORY NOTE: Within parts of the U.S. progressive community there is already widespread concern that electronic voting fraud may provide an explanation for the astonishing 8 million vote gain made by George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential U.S. election.
Already there a variety of odd phenomena which have aroused suspicions about this possibility:
For example:
- In Florida Bush received a million extra votes, while Kerry received only 500,000 extra votes, in spite of a massive Democratic Get-Out-The-Vote(GOTV) and registration campaign in that state;
- In Florida's Broward County, a democratic stronghold and heavily black community, unauditable voting machines recorded a 33% (70,000+) vote gain on Bush's 2000 results and a much smaller gain to Kerry ? again Broward was the scene of a massive GOTV campaign;
- In several places voters reported (
http://www.infozine.com/news/s...storiesView/sid/4154/) voting for Kerry but noticing the machine record their vote for Bush;
- Recollections, reported here at Scoop.co.nz in 2003, that there is evidence of vote fraud in Florida in 2000 involving security holes in voting systems;
- Observations that many of the security flaws reported in mid 2003 in vote counting systems remained in place for the 2004 count last night (see?
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ for details.)
But by far the most wide source of public suspicion about the results came from the stark difference between the exit polls, which showed strong Kerry leads in many battleground states including Ohio and Florida, and the actual results in those same states. Bush achieved a 5% margin of victory in Florida and came very close to winning Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Add in the fact that the reported exit poll results were changed in the early hours of Wednesday morning, and there was a recipe for suspicion brewing in the online internet vote fraud community last night.
In order to attempt to get a firmer hold on the extent of vote fraud if it did occur Faun Otter (a veteran of the U.S. based vote fraud investigative community) conducted the following preliminary analysis comparing the initial exit poll results (note this link takes you to the revised results) vs actual results.
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