Internet buzz on vote fraud is dismissed(Boston Globe/ABCNote says silly!) [View All]

[papau]

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/TheNote/story?id=156238

ABCNOTE SAYS "<snip>All you need to know about the status of the Boston Globe and the Massachusetts Democratic Party, the Boston Globe and the national Democratic Party, and the Boston Globe and Senator Kerry can be summed up in today's paper: a front-pager on the resignation of the state party chair, a front-pager on how the Internet silliness about the election being fixed is, well, Internet silliness, and an inside wire story chronicling the return of John Kerry to the Hill and public life.<SNIP>"


http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/articles/2004/11/10/internet_buzz_on_vote_fraud_is_dismissed/


Internet buzz on vote fraud is dismissed
By Rick Klein, Globe Staff | November 10, 2004

WASHINGTON -- <snip>President Bush recorded 4,258 votes to Senator John F. Kerry's 260 in one suburb of Columbus, Ohio -- where only 638 ballots were cast. Across Ohio, some 76,000 punch-card ballots did not register votes for president, and officials have only begun to comb through 155,428 provisional ballots.

In Holmes County, Florida, though nearly three-quarters of registered voters are Democrats, Bush wiped out Kerry, 6,410 to 1,810, in results that mirrored those in several other counties where optical-scan paper ballots were used. And in Florida's Broward County, after the first 32,000 absentee ballots were fed into the computer system, a software glitch caused additional ballots to be subtracted from vote totals, rather than added.<snip>

Kerry campaign officials and a range of election-law specialists agree that while machines made errors and long lines in Democratic precincts kept many voters away, there's no realistic chance that Kerry actually beat Bush.<snip>

Still, with reports swirling on the Internet, six Democratic members of Congress have asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate. Leading academics have joined the fray as well, saying that the integrity and future of the nation's voting system demand a vetting of all claims.<snip>

''I think it's safe to say that on the votes that were cast in Ohio, Bush won," said Dan Tokaji, a law professor at Ohio State University who is working with the ACLU to challenge Ohio's use of punch-card ballots. ''If the margin had been 36,000 rather than 136,000, we would have seen another post-election meltdown."<snip>

As for the exit polls, they remain subject to sampling errors and limitations in data gathering. The polls sponsored by a consortium of media companies had margins of error of roughly 3 percent, and in closely contested states shown to be leaning toward Kerry, narrow Bush wins were actually within the expected range. Florida's margin was larger than expected, but poll takers reported problems getting close enough to voting places to collect adequate samples, and said they feared they were not getting Bush voters to be as forthcoming with their choice as Kerry voters.<snip>


Globe correspondent Alan Wirzbicki contributed to this report. Rick Klein can be reached at [e-mail].