UC Berkeley Researchers Claim Electronic Voting Irregularities in Florida

BERKELEY, Calif.
A research team at the University of California at Berkeley released a statistical study last month reporting that irregularities with electronic voting machines may have awarded more than 130,000 excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election.

"In Broward County alone, President Bush appears to have received approximately 72,000 excess votes," according to the report.

The study reported a discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods.

"For the sake of all future elections involving electronic voting — someone must investigate and explain the statistical anomalies in Florida," Dr. Michael Hout, a professor of sociology, says.

The research team is comprised of doctoral students and faculty in the UC Berkeley sociology department, and led by Hout, an expert on statistical methods and member of the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center.

"No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained," according to Hout. "The study shows that a county's use of electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this appearing in a population where the true difference is zero — less than once in a thousand chances."

The report can be viewed at http:// ucdata.berkeley.edu