A bizzare pattern of impossible anomalies This has long been known : the welter of financial ties of Diebold and ES&S to the radical religious right (with stakeholders currently, it seems, on the secretive CNP) and Bob Fitrakis notes : "Wherever Diebold and ES&S go, irregularities and historic Republican upsets follow." Howard Ahmanson was the original funder for Bob and Todd Urosevich's Data Mark,which became ES&S, Bob later left to head Diebold ,maker of HAVA Act mandated touch screen voting machines used in Ohio and Florida and elsewhere....Ahmanson is a Christian Reconstructionist (a form of Dominionism ) who has talked of imposing Biblical law on the US - including the death penalty for gays and drunkards - and is also a main funder of the Chalcedon Foundation. However, the most bizzare patterns of anomalies in Florida came not from touch-screen but optical scan machines. Florida's central vote tabulator also is Diebold made, raising questions on the a bizzare pattern of anomalies in which a large number of counties in Florida had increases in Republicans votes over expected levels - by an overall average of 50% to 100% and - in one county, as high as 700%. Meanhwhile, here are graphs of variance between exit poll results for battleground states.
posted by troutfishing on Nov 5, 2004 - 85 comments

2000 Election results ranked by avg statewide IQ. Shame on me for even posting this here in this slavering den of liberal fervor, but if it's true, it certainly is kinda fascinating.
posted by jonson on May 6, 2004 - 75 comments

Florida to settle 2000 election lawsuit. Major provisions include a promise for massive reforms in voter registration, voter-roll maintenance and polling practices, as part of the lawsuit pushed by the NAACP. Granted, it's good that a large angered group is "getting over it" as many (even on this board) have still been explaining, but should skeptics (read: Democrats) such as myself read the Florida legislature's desire to settle as a sign that they may not have thought they would have won against charges of rigging the election?
posted by XQUZYPHYR on Aug 31, 2002 - 11 comments

When you're an aiga member they send you e-mail, I usualy don't read them, because they're accouncements of conferences and such, but this one was about Chicago enlisting the help of AIGA to design new election ballots. 'Some possibilities for making Chicago ballots more user-friendly include enlarging candidates' names, changing the font size, altering the color of pages, making wider ballot booklets.' Since I couldn't find the article on-line, I'll just cut-n-paste the e-mail inside. :)
posted by tiaka on Dec 2, 2000 - 8 comments

Chicago to enlist graphic designers for friendlier ballots. [free reg may be req'd] There's been a bunch of discussion about the usability problems with various voting systems, notably punch-card ballots. Chicago didn't have anything as dramatic as a "butterfly" prexy ballot or two pages' worth of candidates, but we still had close to 120,000 discards from 2.1 million votes -- and when compared with jurisdictions using other systems, there's little evidence to suggest that voters are skipping the presidential ballot. That's just how bad manual punch card technology is. Even if we can't get rid of them just yet, at least we can make sure they aren't confusing. Did I just post the twenty-sixth link on Metafilter today? GO AWAY. METAFILTER IS FULL. :)
posted by dhartung on Nov 29, 2000 - 24 comments

Did the INS import votes?
posted by tiaka on Nov 11, 2000 - 6 comments

"In other words, the odds are less than 1 in a billion that the original vote was a fair count." OJR asked Dr. Lynn Miller, a professor of communications and expert on statistics at the USC Annenberg School to comment on what she found at CNN.com regarding the Florida Situation.
posted by th3ph17 on Nov 10, 2000 - 4 comments

Wherefore art thou, NM? "Amid the intense legal and public relations battle for Florida and its 25 electoral votes, Al Gore may have lost a state: New Mexico."
posted by bilco on Nov 10, 2000 - 9 comments

What a shock: your votes does count.
posted by tranquileye on Nov 8, 2000 - 6 comments

Here is the best reason I've seen yet not to vote.
posted by netbros on Nov 6, 2000 - 0 comments

"I think the secretary of state is clamping down on pure political speech," says the ACLU, as they gear up to try to reopen Voteswap2000 and other vote-swapping sites.
posted by snarkout on Nov 2, 2000 - 7 comments