2004 United States presidential election controversy and irregularities

Template:Totallydisputed After the U.S. presidential election on November 2, 2004, some sources have made allegations of significant data irregularities and systematic flaws have skewed the results of the election. The overall official result of the election is not at this time being officially challenged by the U.S. Senator John Kerry, the Democratic candidate and primary opponent to incumbent Republican George W. Bush. However, many people and groups (including the media, independent candidate Ralph Nader, Kerry's brother and legal advisor Cameron Kerry, members of the House Judiciary Committee, and many Democratic groups) are currently analyzing the available data. No comprehensive analyses have yet been produced, but allegations and preliminary analyses have been made by a variety of commentators ranging from computer scientists to voting rights organizations, and many others.

One part of the controversy are electronic and optical-scan voting machines, which were used in greater numbers than before as a result of concerns over the reliability of manual machines raised during the 2000 election. Other reported problems relate to abnormally high voter turnout (more votes in many precincts than registered voters in said precincts), discrepancies between exit poll data and actual results especially in swing states and the complications which arose due to long lines; particularly in high-population areas and in closely contested states.

Key issues

Electronic touch screen voting machines. The reliability and accuracy has not been established, and in most cases they were not designed with a paper trail or auditability in mind. Many computer scientists have claimed the potential of these machines to be tampered with was high, citing such possibilities as the machines being reprogrammed on election day. The election incident reporting system (EIRS) has recieved many reports from voters and election officials of votes for Kerry being recorded as votes for Bush. The fact that the CEO of one electronic voting machine company was quoted in 2003 as saying he wanted to "deliver" the next election for Bush has further fuelled suspicions of fraud.
Problems with non-electronic voting machines. In some counties there are larger statistical discrepancies than electronic voting machines. See below.
Voter suppression, intimidation, lost ballots, efforts to discredit citizens that may be validly registered. This has the aim of reducing turn out for people believed to support the other side.
Significant disagreement between exit poll data and actual results, especially in swing states (apparently not matched by similar discrepancies in most non-swing states or other election matters).
Significant disagreement between party affiliation registration statistics for counties and results for that county, especially in swing states. For example, in one Florida county that has 77 percent registered Democrats, Bush received 77 percent of the vote.

Voting machines

In many cases there were concerns as to whether votes were fairly, reliably, and accurately recorded and reported by the electronic machines involved. The charts below demonstrate this.

Voting machine company with political ties to the Republican Party

In 2003 Wally O'Dell CEO of Diebold said in a letter to Ohio Republican officials that he was committed, "to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President". [1] Diebold is the company which makes electronic touch screen voting machines used in Ohio and other states, most significantly Florida. Ohio and Florida were two of the "swing" states critical to the 2004 election.

Chuck Hagel, the previous chairman of ES&S, another major manufacturer of voting machines and still a $1m stock-holder in McCarthy & Co which owns a quarter of ES&S, became a Republican candidate. Hagel's Democratic opponent made a formal protest to the state of Nebraska over the conflict of interest.

Other criticisms of Diebold's voting machines

Unreported faults and problems known to manufacturer

Oct. 27, 2004 -- The state of California has ordered that 15,000 brand new touch-screen voting machines not be used in next week's presidential election. These electronic machines were manufactured by Diebold Inc., a North Canton, Ohio-based company that also specializes in automated teller machines and electronic security.

"Of course we would have wished the situation would not have happened, but it did," Rapke told ABC News. "There was back up available. But again, with additional familiarity with the system, again, this problem would not have happened." But a former Diebold technical worker, James Dunn, told ABC News the company was aware of the software and electronic problems before the election, and never reported them. "The machine would lock up or lose its software load. A very uncommon thing and not a good thing," said Dunn. "And once that machine's locked up you're unable to produce voter cards, which means you're unable to open the election voting machine and people can't vote. But they shipped it anyway."

Poor security against hacking and other electronic fraud

The same source also claims that "Experts have raised questions about the machines' security features, which some say can be easily defeated, making it possible to manipulate the actual vote count.

"In all of my consulting work and all of my work in industry I've never seen a system that I thought was this vulnerable to abuse," said Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, who, along with other security experts, analyzed Diebold's source code for the electronic voting machines."

In at least one case it appears a voting machine was hacked during a primary election in King County Washington and a warning was issued to disconnect all voting machines from the internet. But this would not prevent the effects of hacking totally [2].

Political impact of anomalies on voting

March 5, 2004 : "Harris has also posted a post-mortem by CBS detailing how the network managed to call Volusia County for Bush early in the morning. The report states: "Had it not been for these [computer] errors, the CBS News call for Bush at 2:17:52 AM would not have been made." As Harris notes, the 20,000-vote error shifted the momentum of the news reporting and nearly led Gore to concede.

What's particularly troubling, Harris says, is that the errors were caught only because an alert poll monitor noticed Gore's vote count going down through the evening, which of course is impossible. Diebold blamed the bizarre swing on a "faulty memory chip," which Harris claims is simply not credible. The whole episode, she contends, could easily have been consciously programmed by someone with a partisan agenda. Such claims might seem far-fetched, were it not for the fact that a cadre of computer scientists showed a year ago that the software running Diebold's new machines can be hacked with relative ease. The hackers posted some 13,000 pages of internal documents on various web sites -- documents that were pounced on by Harris and others. A desperate Diebold went to court to stop this "wholesale reproduction" of company material."

(Sources for this section: 1) ABC News [3] and 2) [4])

Voting Machine problems (including Diebold): Electronic voting#Problems with electronic voting

Evidence of electronic voting bias

Note: As with all statistics, it is very important to consider other causes of apparent anomalies, and to provide verifiable and neutral source data that can be checked in a neutral way by third parties. All the information and sources below appear prima facie to be statistically reasonable in terms of both analysis and assumptions, and to be based upon verifiable public data.

(1) An analysis of Florida counties with 80,000 - 500,000 registered voters concluded (with a few caveats of a usual kind) that machine type (E-Touch vs Op-Scan) was a "significant predictor" of vote at the p < 0.001 level (less than one chance in a thousand of this degree of anomaly happening by chance) [5] Source data and calculations [6].

(2) One website discusses Gahanna, Franklin Co. Ohio. The vote reported by the county in Gahanna precinct 1-B was 4,258 Bush, 260 Kerry, and the total votes cast in Gahanna overall were 20,736. However:

Gahanna has some 20,000 people elegible to vote and the reported turnout was around 70%. On a casual reckoning approximately 14,000 people voted, and yet nearly 21,000 votes were reported by voting machines.
4,258 Republican votes were electronically reported for Bush in Gahanna 1-B. But there were only 638 votes cast in the precinct. Furthermore the 3,893 extra individuals who are said to have queued to vote for Bush, and were therefore presumably Republican, did not appear to vote on any other matter bar the Presidency. (These other matters included the Senate race, County Commissioner, several County and State officials, and the imfamous Gay Unions vote, issues of great importance in the election.)

Source: [7], source data from govt website pdf

(3) An analysis reported in the New Zealand press looks at the differences between exit polls and reported voting in more detail. It identifies that in a selection of non-swing states, the exit polls and final results match. However in a large proportion of what were identified before the election as key swing states (Wisconsin, Pennysylvania, Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire, etc.), the exit polls and final votes do not match.

The error was in each case a statistically anomalous and electorally critical 4 - 15% swing (change between exit polls and electronic voting) and furthermore the anomalies were not random. In each of the above swing states, this variation between what voters said they voted and what the machines reported was in favour of Mr. Bush. Source [8], article discussing here, graphs here.

(4) An interesting article comments that:

Exit polls into the evening of Nov. 2 actually showed Kerry rolling to a clear victory nationally and carrying most of the battleground states, including Florida and Ohio, whose totals would have ensured Kerry's victory in the Electoral College.
The exit polls covered both the Presidential and Senate races. The votes reported by voting machines for the Senate races were in line with the exit polls for the Senate race, however the votes reported by the same voting machines for the Presidency often significant disagreed with the exit polls for the Presidency.
It also comments that "Democratic suspicions also were raised by Republican resistance to implementing any meaningful backup system for checking the results on Diebold and other electronic-voting machines."

(5) There were additional reports of significantly large data irregularities with the "optical scan" type voting machines in at least Florida. In one county using optical scan voting machines for example, election records showed 77% registered democrats but Bush received 77% of the vote.

Expert testimony on quality of current voting machines

(1) Testimony of Dr. Aviel D. Rubin to U.S. Federal Election Assistance Commission, on Electronic Voting Systems, May 2004:

(Witness credentials: Professor of Computer Science, Technical Director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, served on SERVE security peer review group for Dept. of Defense, member of National Committee on Voting Integrity, and 2004 election judge in local county)

There is no way for voters to verify that their votes were recorded correctly.
There is no way to publicly count the votes.
In the case of a controversial election, meaningful recounts are impossible.
With respect to the Diebold Accuvote TS and TSx, we found gross design and programming errors, as outlined in our attached report. The current certification process resulted in these machines being approved for use and being used in elections.
We do not know if the machines from other vendors are as bad as the Diebold ones because they have not made their systems available for analysis.

"On the spectrum of terrible to very good, we are sitting at terrible. Not only have the vendors not implemented security safeguards that are possible, they have not even correctly implemented the ones that are easy. If I had more time I would debunk the myth of the security of the so-called triple redundancy in the Diebold machines. I would explain the limitations of logic and accuracy testing in an adversarial setting, I would explain how easy it would be for a malicious programmer to rig the election with today's DREs [voting machines], and I would describe the seriousness of the security flaws that we and others have found in the Diebold machines. These are all things that I could have done and would have been happy to do, before anybody started purchasing and using these DREs. But nobody asked."

"Since our study came out, three other major studies ... all cited serious security vulnerabilities in DREs. RABA, which is closely allied with the National Security Agency, called for a "pervasive rewrite" of Diebold's code. Yet, the vendors, and many election officials ... continue to insist that the machines are perfectly secure. I cannot fathom the basis for their claims. I do not know of a single computer security expert who would testify that these machines are secure. I personally know dozens of computer security experts who would testify that they are not."

(Source: [9])

List of complaints

A substantial number of people said they voted for one candidate but the vote was recorded for another. While some spotted this, there are fears that most may not have. [10]

(Anecdotally from websites, a common theme on this topic seems to be that claims of vote mis-statement are more often made by people who voted for Kerry but the vote showed for Bush. It's not clear whether were this to be studied, it would turn out to be urban myth or verified fact)

Machines are supposed to not lose votes in a power outage. Voters cannot tell whether vote integrity was in fact maintained as intended when power goes down, as happened at least in one polling station (Dekalb Co. GA, 15 minutes powerout) [11]
Machines are not robust against error [12] and [13]

A minor abberation: At least one machine began counting back down to zero when it reached 32000 votes; manufacturers ES&S are said to have known about (but not rectified) this issue for two years since the same problem had arisen in a previous mayoral election. (Broward Co., FL) [14]

(Also some machines malfunctioned and demo machines were used instead, hastily programmed to replace them. It is not clear to those who voted who did this or what was involved in this "programming" [15])

Machines do not always produce an audit trail—that is, if there is a doubt as to whether the machine has accurately represented and counted votes, there may not always be a way to neutrally verify the stated result. [16]
Machines do not have "open" software, so it has not been generally possible for people to confirm that the software does not mis-state votes periodically.
Unexplained 3 hour gap in electronic voting machine security audit records intended to confirm no hacking has taken place (King Co., WA.)
Discrepancies in claimed totals of provisional ballots (Ohio)
"Votes" present in at least one electronic voting machine before polls opened
Unless exceptionally well designed, computers can be "hacked" and manipulated in an undetectable manner by experts.
Other sources of lost data include hard drive crashes, inappropriate deletion, and the like, including, when audit trails are kept, failure for the totals to match the tally of votes as reported by machines [17].

Voting fraud is also both possible and hard to prove with some versions of electronic voting machines.

Sample source: "Experts said the company designed the machines and software so that vote totals could easily be altered without leaving a trace. Losing candidates in one race charged that when the computer acted up on election night, a CES employee inserted control cards into the machine. The plaintiffs sued to retrieve the source code, and the court, for once, consented. When computer experts examined the software, they determined that CES had changed the computer's instructions for tallying votes on election night. But because the program lacked adequate auditing mechanisms to track the nature of those changes, no one could determine if the company had rigged the election." [18] for this and similar stories.

Charts, Graphs and Statistics

Result Plots - Florida

See http://www.ustogether.org/election04/florida_vote_patt.htm

Exit Polls

Discrepancies Map

Voting locations that used electronic or other types of voting machines that did not issue a paper receipt or offer auditability correlate geographically with areas that had discrepancies in Bush's favor between exit poll numbers and actual results. Exit polling data in these areas show significantly higher support for Kerry than actual results (potentially outside the margin of error). From a statistical perspective, this may be indicative of vote rigging, because the likelihood of this happenning by chance is extremely low. A study of 16 states by a former MIT mathematics professor places the likelihood at 1 in 50,000. [19]

File:2004 us popular vote2.gif

Exit Polls vs. Machine Tallies, by State (9 States)

Supporting the same conclusions of the maps above, here are bar graphs indicating the differentials between Exit Polls and Machine Tallies for nine e-voting and paper ballot states. The discrepancies appear to affect the e-voting states to a significantly greater degree than they affect the Paper Ballot states.

File:Exit poll small.jpg

Manipulation of exit poll data

The following tables compare final exit poll data with penultimate exit poll data, note the large swing of support towards Bush, with Kerry losing votes which is mathematically impossible if votes are only being added. It was claimed that initial exit poll data was "inaccurate" but no details and little comment on this discrepancy were provided. (direct link to screenshots and data: CNN website 12.21am CNN website 1.41am):

CNN screenshot #1:

12.21 am, 1963 respondents so far

Total vote: Male 47% , Female 53% of which:

Male - Bush 47% x 49% x 1963 452

Male - Kerry 47% x 51% x 1963 471

Female - Bush 53% x 47% x 1963 489

Female - Kerry 53% x 53% x 1963 551

TOTAL - Bush 941

TOTAL - Kerry 1022

(rounding: estimates of voters in each category accurate within +/- 10)

CNN screenshot #2:

1.41 am, 2020 respondents so far (57 more than above)

Total vote: Male 47% , Female 53% of which:

Male - Bush 47% x 52% x 2020 499

Male - Kerry 47% x 47% x 2020 451

Female - Bush 53% x 50% x 2020 535

Female - Kerry 53% x 50% x 2020 535

TOTAL - Bush 1034

TOTAL - Kerry 986

(rounding: estimates of voters in each category accurate within +/- 10)

The addition of an extra 57 voters at this station was therefore reported as +93 votes for Bush by AP and CNN at least, and voters monitoring the exit polls were told authoritatively that Bush had now taken a lead from Kerry.

Vote Suppression

Long Lines

Long lines, though seemingly benign - "a mere inconvenience" - may well be the most serious problem with the 2004 election. In many places, lines were over 6 hours long.

Prior to the election, there was much ado about each precinct getting enough ballots, but an equally serious matter that seems to have been overlooked by people trying to protect people's right to vote is whether the precints had a sufficient number of voting machines, such that the votes could be proccessed at a sufficient rate. Machine quantity as well as ballot quantity determines the saturation point of votes. Number of machines * Max. votes per hour per machine * hours poll is open = max. number of votes precinct is able to process. Every voter over this limit is effectively disenfranchised, just as if the precint had run out of ballots; the precinct runs out of voter-time-slots.

Although low population precincts had relatively plenty of voting machines and were well within the limits of processing capacity, high-population centers often did not, and sometimes had less than half the machines requested and were well outside the limits of processing capacity, effectively disenfranchisng an undetermined number of voters.

This may explain the discrepancy between expected voter turnout in high-population areas and counted voter turnout in these areas. Since high-population areas are predominantely Democratic, this would primarily effect the Democratic constituency, and appear on the surface to reflect inefficacy in the Democratic GOTV effort.

841 incidents of this type have been reported, 241 of which are from Ohio, and 106 of which are from Florida. 124 such incidents have been reported out of Cuyahoga county, Ohio.

Minorities

Specific concerns were raised in the course of the election in respect of votes from key minorities, such as Blacks [20] or Cuban Hispanics.

Official viewpoints and responses

As of yet, neither political party has made an official response to the issue, nor have the U.S. or foreign media.

Republican Party

(none yet)

Democratic Party

The House Judiciary Committee Democrats are asking for an inquiry to certain problems.

U.S. media

(none yet)

Overseas

(none yet)

Nader is looking at challenging results, see his campaign site. Also, a lot of private citizens (eg Stallman) are gathering evidence.

External links

(Note, these two websites are not affiliated with each other, however both carry web pages relevant to this article))

blackboxvoting Articles and voter field reports
Institute for Public Accuracy
[21] Expert testimony as to procedures needed to make electronic voting secure
[22] article written by the founder and CTO of Counterpane Internet Security Inc., on Electronic Voting.
[23] Article by The Economist
[24] e-voting experts' website and weblog, large amount of information and expert discussion (panellist credentials provided)
Keith Olbermann's blog 11/07/04
11/08/04 Olbermann segment online
[25] Voters Unite Listing of All Reported Irregularities
[26] Tom Paine's article
[27] Democratic Underground discussion board on the topic
Common Dreams report
Voting reopened in NC because of mistake

Articles on result discrepancies

Key issues

Voting machines

Voting machine company with political ties to the Republican Party

Other criticisms of Diebold's voting machines

Evidence of electronic voting bias

Expert testimony on quality of current voting machines

List of complaints

Charts, Graphs and Statistics

Result Plots - Florida

Exit Polls

Discrepancies Map

Exit Polls vs. Machine Tallies, by State (9 States)

Manipulation of exit poll data

Vote Suppression

Long Lines

Minorities

Official viewpoints and responses

Republican Party

Democratic Party

U.S. media

Overseas

Related Articles

External links

Articles on result discrepancies