Voting irregularities in three Florida counties that used electronic voting machines may have awarded as many as 130,000 votes to President George Bush in this month's election, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.
The Berkeley researchers Thursday claimed that their findings raise questions about the accuracy of voting results in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties, all of which have more voters registered as Democrats than Republicans. According to statistical models, voters in those three counties delivered more than 130,000 more votes to Bush than were expected by a post-election analysis, the researchers maintain.
"Something went awry with electronic voting in Florida," said Michael Hout, a sociology professor, who led the research effort.
Hout said that the odds of the Florida irregularities happening by chance were less than one in a thousand and he called for an examination of the results. "It's like a smoke alarm and it's beeping," he said. "We call upon the voting officials in Florida to determine whether there's a fire."
The irregularities did not account for enough votes to give the state to Democratic challenger John Kerry, who lost to Bush in Florida by more than 377,000 votes.
To obtain their results, the Berkeley researchers analyzed publicly available voting data from all of Florida's counties using a technique called multiple-regression analysis, which accurately identified butterfly ballot problems in Palm Beach County during the 2000 election, Hout said.
The technique involves building a statistical model to predict voting patterns based on a number of factors, including history of voting, median family income, age and race. Hout's team conducted their study using data compiled from the Nov. 2 election.
"We noticed that three counties stood out from those expectations," Hout said. "These were counties that had a significant departure from what we would expect, statistically, given the patterns in all those other counties."
Using their statistical model, Hout's team forecast that Bush should have received 28,000 fewer votes in Broward County than he received there in 2000. However, Bush received 51,000 more votes than he did four years ago. In Palm Beach County, where Bush gained 41,000 votes, the Berkeley research suggested a loss of 8,900 votes. For Miami-Dade County the research showed Bush should have gained 18,400 votes. In fact, he gained 37,000 votes.
The counties in question used e-voting machines manufactured by Election Systems & Software and Sequoia Voting Systems.
The model found an even larger discrepancy when certain factors weighing the data in Bush's favor were removed, Hout said.
The team did not, however, find this level of irregularity in 12 other Florida counties that used e-voting machines, he said.
Hout was unable to explain why some e-voting counties would experience irregularities while others did not, but he said that the irregularities were more likely to occur in counties that voted for Democratic candidate Al Gore in 2000. "This becomes an important clue that investigators who know something about both the software and the hardware can use," he said.
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