Tinfoil hat theory about Florida 2000 ballot tampering...

[Jeebo]

Well, I actually don't think it IS a tinfoil hat theory, but a lot of people hearing it for the first time might think so. It has to do with a curious anomaly Washington Post reporter Dan Keating noticed while he was participating in the post-election media examination of the Florida overvote and undervote ballots. He said of the state's Gore-Bush overvote ballots -- that is, the ballots that the machines registered as containing a vote for Gore AND a vote for Bush -- that ALL of them were in punch-card counties. Think about this, now. This means that NOBODY in the counties in which you voted by filling in an oval with a felt-tip pen accidentally voted for both Bush AND Gore, while SEVERAL THOUSAND people in the counties in which you punched holes in cards made this mistake!

What can possibly explain this anomaly? I have thought and thought about it, and I can come up with no possible explanation other than willful, deliberate ballot tampering. If you were a crooked Republican who had access to the ballots on election night, how could you alter enough ballots at the last minute on election night, when you were able to see in a close election just how many it would take to the throw the election to your guy? To tamper with the optical scan ballots, you would have to sit down and fix them one at a time, and it would require a prohibitive amount of time to alter enough ballots to throw the election. But with the punch-card ballots, you could stack them up two or three dozen at a time and mass-punch them through the "Bush" hole. This would not affect the Bush votes, while turning the Gore votes into -- guess what? -- Bush-Gore overvotes.

I can't take credit for this theory. I read it in two places in the few months after the election. Sharmann Braff wrote a piece about it that is still posted on Democrats.com at http://www.democrats.com/view.cfm?id=1220 and Jackson Thoreau mentioned it in his online e-book about the Florida election theft at http://www.geocities.com/jacksonthor/ebook.html.

I have a fantasy about some Republican who participated in this ballot tampering and whose conscience is bothering him/her about it, making a deathbed confession, the story hitting the media, and the whole Florida 2000 scheme really starting to come unraveled. Because there really is something that stinks to high heaven about that election, and anybody who can't smell that stench is severely olfactorily challenged.

Ron

[NewYorkerfromMass]

1. Yep. Gore ballots became overvotes when punched out for Bush

It's fucking bullshit but I am pretty sure it happened exactly as you describe.

[ewagner]

2. First I heard of this

I didn't know that there wasn't some statistical correlation between overvotes in both kinds of machines....I would have thought there was one........

As for deathbed confessions. Don't count on it. A lot of Bushites consider themselves to be doing God's work.

[Jeebo]

4. That's why I called it a "fantasy"...

"As for deathbed confessions. Don't count on it. A lot of Bushites consider themselves to be doing God's work."

Yes, I know it's a fantasy, but it's just SO lovely to think about.

Ron

[AP]

3. You could have pre-punched a bunch of ballots too.

If the voter voted for Bush, it wouldn't have been funky.

But if they voted for Gore, it'd be a double vote.

In other words, you didn't even have to wait until election night to see how close it was.

In fact, you would have been more likely to do it if you didn't think it was close enough for a recount because it would have been more likely to be discovered if there were a recount.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

5. That's the way I think it was done...pre-punched and ready to go.

[AP]

7. Yeah. I imagine that lot of GOP operatives were shitting in their pants

when the realized there'd be a recount and that some of their tricks might be exposed by an inquisitive media.

But I bet it didn't take them long to realize the media and the gov't wasn't going to give a shit.

[SheilaT]

6. Having had one and only one

experience with a punch card ballot, what was most likely done is that (keep in mind that particular ballot was laid out in an especially confusing way) that the voters had punched the name they thought was the one they wanted, and when they went back to make sure they'd voted the way they intended, punched the other name.

There is, in my opinion, simply no way to be completely certain you've marked a punch card ballot correctly, and thus an unusually large number of those are probably either invalid, or have been marked not in the way the voter intended.

It's a much simpler theory than pre-punched cards being handed out or being re-punched later by nefarious Republican operatives. And it's not that the voters using them were too stupid to vote correctly. The design is inherently flawed, even without the truly awful design of that particular ballot.

[AP]

8. I was a poll watcher in a punch card polling place the very last election

they used punch cards and the poll workers said they'd never ever had a spoiled punch card ballot in all the years of elections they'd run that poll.

I doubt that this happend that way.

[jobycom]

9. 633% increase in Broward County

From 1996 to 2000 (that's one election), the number of undervotes remained the same, but there was a 633% increase in the number of overvotes in that one county alone.

All because of stupid black voters, if you believe the media and the Republicans (oh, sorry, same thing). In stupid white people districts, with the most backwards, inbred, skol-dipping junior high dropouts, overvotes were negligible.

Add Duval County to that mix. There were reports from someone who fed the ballots into the counting machines that some of the ballots weren't just overvoted, but they were ripped up, like someone voted with knife (or like someone in a hurry punched an extra hole or two). When NORC counted the ballots by hand, Duval would not hand over their ballots until forced by the courts, and then they handed them over a few at a time. There were about 2000 that they never did hand over.

I don't think it's a tin-foil theory. I think it's the only logical interpretation of the evidence. And I don't believe many conspiracy theories. I even believe Oswald shot JFK.

[On the Road]

10. There Was One County in the Northeast

with a huge number of overvotes -- something like 10,000. According to the reported data, ALL overvotes had at least three candidates marked. This was the location with the 2-page list of candidates, which did cause some real overvotes due to confusion. But, if ALL overvotes have at least 3 holes, that's fraud.

Some people have even stated that there is a specific piece of equipment which can punch ballots multiple time. I think some ballots may have been mass-punched wherever the locals thought they could get away with it. The election night fraud may have been opportunistic.