Florida vote count weirdness

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From: Robert S. Thau (rst@ai.mit.edu)
Date: Fri Nov 10 2000 - 08:03:32 PPET


The final totals for the recount are now in: Bush by less than 400,
pending absentee ballots. But there's a very weird pattern in the
totals by county, if you look at them at

  http://foxnews.com/fn99/elections/florida_recount.html

From eyeballing this chart, the vast majority of the net change in the
totals came from a very few counties where the change was heavily
imabalanced in favor of Gore, with the bulk in just two:

  Palm Beach - net change +643
  Pinellas --- net change +478
  Duval --- net change +168
  Gadsden --- net change +163
  Polk --- net change +129

The highest changes in favor of Bush were

  Martin --- net change -105
  Seminole --- net change -98 ---- (FWIW, last county to report)

No other county that I can spot had as much as a fifty vote net change
in favor of Bush. Note also that there were counties as populous as
many of these (Hillsboro, Miami-Dade, Broward(!)) where the shifts
weren't nearly as big, less than 50 --- some of which may have to do
with what equipment is used where, to be sure.

Even so, I am at a loss to explain how you generate numbers this
skewed by rolling fair dice of any description; am I nuts, or is this
statistical evidence of irregularity in the initial vote count ("let's
just not count these ballots here")?

Oh, BTW, speaking of absentee ballots,

  http://www.feedmag.com/templates/daily.php3?a_id=1389

In 1998, Xavier Suarez was kicked out of the mayor's office after a
jury found a pattern fraud in absentee ballots. Now he sits on the
executive committee of the Miami-Dade Republican Party, in which
capacity he "helped ... enlist Republican absentee voters" in this
election.

You couldn't make this stuff up...

rst


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