Stolen Votes? Here's how

[BeFree]

I asked ignaztmouse (a new DU'er) to look over some NC numbers for me. Here is what he sent back. Wow! This needs to be e-mailed far and wide. Our own "Shock and Awe" campaign, if you will.

Okay, I've spent the better part of the night with the NC voter numbers, and I've reached the conclusion that there is a stunning case for tampering. Let's start with one sample county. I pulled their election data that lists number of registered voters by county and breaks it down into party affiliation, race, and gender. I chose a predominately black county to give a sharper idea and get free of the crossover voter charge. Here are the demographics for Bertie County, North carolina as of 10-31-2004.

Bertie County has 14,460 registered voters:

Party Affiliation
12052 DEM 83%
1403 REP 10%
1005 UNA/LIB 7%

Ethnicity
8685 BLACK 60%
5633 WHITE 39%
18 AM.INDIAN
12 HISPANIC
34 OTHER

GENDER
8370 FEMALE 58%
6017 MALE 42%

So you can see in every category, this is a Democratic lock.

This is how the vote was recorded:

4801 Kerry/Edwards 61%
3027 Bush/Cheney 38%
35 Badnarik 1%
2 Nader -
7865 Total (a turnout of 54%)

On the face, it's shocking to see a 22% drop in the Democratic vote and a 28% gain in the Republican vote of registered voters. But, we have to be careful in the rural South even in a county that is mostly black. As a reference, let's also look at how the county voted in 2000.

DEM - A. Gore-J. Lieberman 4,660 65%
REP - G. W. Bush-D. Cheney 2,488 35%
LIB - H. Browne-A. Olivier 11 0%
RFM - P. Buchanan-E. Foster 17 0%
7,176

Hmmmm. Well, that shows a 7% swing from 2000 to 2004 for Bush/Cheney. A little hard to believe, but not totally impossible I guess given the possibility that this might be an overwhelmingly democratic black county filled with big Rush Limbaugh fans. Let's look at some further numbers from Bertie and see if they can shed some light.

Senate
Bowles (D) 5089 66%
Burr (R) 2614 34%
Bailey 51 >1%
Total 7754

Governor
Easley (D) 5592 73%
Ballantine (R) 2036 27%
Howe 66 .009%
Total 7694

Secretary of State
Marshall (D) 5,624 77%
Rao (R) 1,650 23%
Total 7274

Notice the Senate race also appears supressed for the Democrats. All other races in Bertie County ran roughly in the range of 73-78% Democrat to 22-27% Republican except for President and Senator. Recall that it was also vitally important for Bush to enter his second term with a substantive majority in the Senate. The same Republican Senate bulge can also be seen in Kentucky for Bunning and likely other states as well. My guess is that they got greedy in states with potential Senate seats and gave them an additional bump to help their majority -- probably making those results even further divergent from the exit polls. It also mirrors the previous data I posted on amendment vote correlation to presidential votes. The bigger the swing necessary, the larger the disparity with amendment votes. (See below for more.)

Now after many hours of going over these figures, I began to ask myself a few questions. If I were to set out to rig the election, how would I go about it? I would have to be smart. There couldn't be a paper trail for them to catch me. The fewer people in on the fix, the better - a programmer or two perhaps but anyone more could create too many loose ends that couldn't be controlled. It would have to be either in the touchscreen machine programming, an entry point in the tabulating computer, or in the main computer's software. Nothing with a paper trail. As we've seen systems with a paper trail came very close to matching the exit polls. Systems without paper trails were often well off the exit polls. BUT THERE'S ANOTHER PAPER TRAIL: ABSENTEE BALLOTS.

With that in mind, I decided to have a look at North Carolina's absentee ballots. It was hidden in the precinct data, so it took me a while to download it and go through it county by county. Incidentally, Lee and Catawba counties reported no absentees, so I don't know if they are missing or recorded elsewhere. But for the other 100 counties, the results are:

BUSH 529755 53%
KERRY 469522 47%
OTHER 2749 >1%
TOTAL 1002026


Interestingly, that's amazingly close to the exit polls, a 6% difference bewtween Bush and Kerry. The official statewide results, however, show a full 12% difference:

BUSH 1,926,186 56%
KERRY 1,492,058 44%
OTHER 12630 >1%
Total 3,430,874


And worst, if one subtracts the absentees, to see how the "vote" actually occurred at the polls, we see a 16% difference -- even further away from the reality of the exit polls -- and this is what they actually sampled!

BUSH 1396431 58%
Kerry 1022536 42%
OTHER 9881 >1%
TOTAL 2428848


Holy crap, Batman! The absentees are loudly pointing out the tampering, and I have a strong suspicion that they will prove similar in other states. Absentees are the largest real sample we have (more than a million in NC). Why else would they be SO FAR FROM THE POLL VOTE? THERE IS CONCERTED AND DIRECTED ELECTION TAMPERING!!! CHECK THE ABSENTEES and see how close they come to the exit polls in the states that are out of whack.

One final note...

The other benchmark I used previously was the amendment vote disparity: what percentage of voters voted on both the presidential election and on the state's amendments? Tellingly, North Carolina like Kentucky with a close and necessary Senate race had a horrible percentage. It leads me to believe that whatever fix they were using dropped off the amendment votes (i.e. if it didn't have an R or a D, it didn't register on the change). Just 86% of North Carolina voters seemed to have voted on their top amendment. Using Oregon's paper ballot standard of amendment-presidential vote correlation, it reveals a potential 439,066 missing amendment votes in NC. Dividing that number by the total votes cast gives a percentage of 13%. The figure must be considered a very rough estimate due to uncertainty, but again it is revealingly very close to the exit poll differential.

[Eloriel]

1. Excellent work, thank you

I have always personally been just as afraid of absentee and provisional ballots as the machines. They ROUTINELY are "lost" (accidentally or on purpose), thrown away, discarded, or often enough just not even tabulated once an election is over.

In THIS instance, I was also afraid that they'd give some areas a "preview" of what kinds of vote stats they would need to overcome or counter on Nov. 2.

Just my suspicious mind....