Trail of Electronic Voting Uncovered: A Summary of NC Findings

I've been asked for a summary of my findings in North Carolina. It is important that the key finding is not lost in the length of my report as it may have uncovered national implications for paperless electronic voting. We suspected it. Here it is.

Quite simply, in a comparative analysis of voting systems in the North Carolina 2004 General Election, counties that used electronic voting produced and unexplainable, unavoidable, and distinct early vote disparity with the rest of the state. The effect was SO GREAT that electronic voting gave Bush an enormous 12% point advantage over Kerry while Optical Scan counties with roughly the same number of votes showed only a 2% margin of difference. How does one account for this outside of technological creativity? Here are the numbers:

Absentee/Early Vote

Optical Scan:
Bush: 249,385 51%
Kerry: 235,175 49% -2%

Electronic Voting:
Bush: 280,354 56%
Kerry: 221,235 44% -12%

What is this? Mandate on order? Even though the DRE's had the largest voting block and HIGHEST percentage of early voting, the DRE's had the WORST margin of disparity between the candidates, a 12% LEAD for Bush at 56% to 44%. To further add fuel to the disparity, the rate of early voting within electronic voting counties was much higher than with any other voting system. Electronic voting counties cast 34% of their votes via early and absentee voting whereas the rate was just 29% among optical scan counties. A high early voting turnout is supposed to favor the Democrats' enormous GOTV campaign and yet in paperless electronic voting, this meant a 12% edge for Bush.

Another revealing study found that the 36 electronic voting counties posted leads for Kerry only 5 times, a dismal rate of only 13.8%, but the rate of Kerry early leads for the rest of the state in all other forms of voting was 33.3%, NEARLY TWO AND HALF TIMES HIGHER.

KERRY LEADS STUDY
E-voting: 36 Counties; 5 early leads 13.8%
Optical Scans: 49 Counties; 16 early leads 32.7%
All other: 14 Counties; 5 early leads 35.7%
(note: Lee County did not post early vote counts.)

Although e-voting dominated the early voting and captured 42% of the statewide votes, electronic results ran wildly counter to all forms of auditable voting. Further, within the electronic voting canopy, 3 of the 5 leads were posted by a single vendor, MicroVote General, in just 7 counties. For the rest of the e-voting vendors, the results were an almost non-existent 2 out of 29, 6.9%. There is simply no justification for this. The largest e-voting vendor in North Carolina is ES&S. ES&S serves 13 counties of which Kerry posted an early lead in but one county...by 234 votes! I can hear you thinking... "It must be demographics. It just has to be demographics." Well, let's look.

DEMOGRAPHIC COMPARISON

GROUP A: North Carolina Statewide
DEM 2,582,462 47%
REP 1,903,119 34%
LIB 12,754 0.20%
UNA 1,021,648 19%
Total 5,519,983
White 4,224,098 79%
Black 1,112,959 21%

Group B: ES&S E-Voting (serves 13 counties: 8DEM, 1REP, 4SPLIT)
DEM 295,384 47%
REP 219,759 34.50%
LIB 1239 0.20%
UNA 117,374 18.50%
Total 633,756
White 487,416 78%
Black 134,289 22%

Group C: Microvote General E-Voting (serves 7 counties: 3DEM, 1REP, 3 SPLIT)
DEM 335,529 44%
REP 269,203 36%
LIB 1786 0.20%
UNA 149,551 20%
Total 756,069
White 550,657 75%
Black 179,733 25%

The figures are nearly identical. ES&S has the same Democratic ratio as the rest of the state. They have a hair-split more Republican to Unannounced ratio. They even have 1% higher Black population. ES&S has 3% more Democrats than MicroVote but also a 3% less Black population. ES&S e-voting counties are dominated by Democratic stronghold counties (8 of their 13 counties) and in the one county where Kerry tabulated a 234 vote lead, it swung wildly to a 45/55 Bush success on election day. In comparison, MicroVote General has seven counties of which only three are Democratic strongholds and yet Kerry posted early leads in three counties by 6%, 8%, and 40% percent margins. This is a dire signal that something isn't just wrong, it's got wrong written into it. And if the electronic vote in North Carolina is in question, it must be equally as suspect in the same hidden hands throughout the country.


Full study in numbing detail is posted at these locations:

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http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...?showtopic=6158

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu...9&mesg_id=69829

Media covering this story in North Carolina

See recent topic, statewide investigators auditing the voting machines. Need computer scientists and activist teams. If this is done in Ohio, the legality of Ohio is officially over and done with.

The story cites only Gaston County. Is this being done anywhere else in the state? Gaston is the only Diebold e-voting county, the largest e-voting vendor is ES&S. Also, there are a lot of people who hold Bartlett suspect.

http://www.charlotte.com

The observer cites multiple up to the minute stories, all over N.C updated in real time. ES&S is also being audited in two states already including Indiana.

bump

Running off the final and ninth page now. Will need some quiet time to read it (after I catch Bill Mahr on Larry King during the next run). Thanks.