Regarding the Palm Beach County vote, if, and I say if, it were to turn out that the majority of overvotes were Bush-Gore double punches, then you would have some evidence on your side to argue for fraud.
As it stands now, not only do you not have any evidence, you are arguing against all the available evidence and against common sense.
If you remember, voters complained about the ballot design on Election Day, long before anyone knew it would matter, and in fact emergency notices were sent to all the precincts by 10:00 am with instructions on how the precinct workers should tell voters the correct way to vote. That doesn't happen unless there are ballot problems.
And when you looked at the ballot to see what caused the problem, it was easy to spot. If you wanted to vote for Bush, his name was first & you punched the first hole. No problem there. If you wanted to vote for Gore, his name was second & you punched the second hole -- no wait, you just voted for Buchanan. Either you properly got a new ballot, or you tried to "fix" it, resulting in an overvote, or you didn't notice.
So the ballot problems should have resulted in an abnormally large number of Buchanan, which it did (over six times as many as in any other county in Florida, including the most conservative), and a large number of overvotes, which it did (19,000), with most of the overvotes being Gore-Buchanan overvotes. That has yet to be determined.
The implication of this evidence is that Gore lost between 3,000 and 15,000 votes in Palm Beach County because the ballot confusion benefitted Bush. To argue that Bush lost votes just flies in the face of the evidence.
What I found suspicious had nothing to do with Palm Beach County. The Miami Herald found that the ballot reject rate in majority black districts was 10%. This is very, very high and very different from all other districts, which had a 3% reject rate. I find that reject rate suspicious and I wish to see it investigated to see if it is just due to mistakes in voting or if broken equipment was being directed to black precincts. If the difference between the reject rates of black and white precincts turns out to be higher in Republican counties than Democratic counties, then I will definitely smell a rat. |
