Wayne -
Message 14785198
The key question is whether the double punched ballots in Palm Beach county actually were a combination of Buchanon-Gore as is assumed without any independent verification, or whether most are Bush-Gore as most would likely be in case of tampering by adding extra Gore punches. If the question is not investigated, it will never be known. If the question is asked, it would be trivial to refute the theory by simply providing the full population of voided ballots for independent examination. Tampering can be done by anyone, in any county, and can even include offsetting punches for both Bush and Gore to help disguise the tampering.
That said, I looked at the CNN Florida vote data for all 67 counties and tabulated the vote totals for Bush, Gore, McCollum and Nelson. (R-Pres., D-P, R-Sen, D-S)
In 63 of the 67 counties the Bush vote exceeded the Republican Senate vote for McCollum by typically 10% (judged by inspection only), with a fair degree of variation. In 4 counties, the losing Republican Senate candidate actually had more votes than Bush. These counties were Charlotte, Collier, Lee, and Palm Beach. Arbitrarily assuming a 10% premium for Bush over McCollum, the degree of possible Bush vote suppression would be 5300, 6100, 12400, and 17100 votes respectively for those 4 counties.
In about 56 of the 67 counties Gore ran significantly behind Nelson, the winning Democratic Senate candidate. In the remaining 11 counties, including the 4 counties above, Gore vote totals were either comparable to, or in excess of the Nelson totals. The most significant other counties were Broward, Dade, and Martin. If there were tampering, this is how it would show up as a Gore total enhancement. The proposed method of tampering would have a much lower Gore enhancement effect than a Bush suppression effect. In any case the possible Gore enhancement effect doesn't seem to come far enough out of the noise to assign any numbers, if it even exists.
Some, but not all, of the above may be the result of bad data on the CNN site, which in at least one case certainly exists, although it is not significant.
Regards, Don |
