Vote Machine Fraud documented in Florida Coastal Counties- Hearings to be Held Feb 1 & 3

The biggest Democratic counties in Florida are Palm Beach, Broward, and Dade. Each of these counties had dozens of precincts where vote-switching was reported. Most involved switches from Kerry to Bush, but there a few reported cases of votes switching from Kerry to a minor candidate or no vote. (Recall that non-votes were likely to be switched to Bush. A smaller number of reports documented votes switched from Betty Castor to Mel Martinez in Florida’s U.S. Senate race. Poll workers and poll watchers told frustrated voters who were having trouble that "this has been going on all day". EIRS found that these problems were so widespread they were reported throughout Election Day on local Florida radio and TV stations. A smaller number of vote switching cases were reported in Hillsboro, Sarasota, Pinellas, Pasco, and Lee counties. Some of these were votes switched in the U.S. Senate race. (Click here to see the EIRS report Florida’s voting machines.)

If a significant number of machines were programmed for "Default to Bush," this would mean fewer than normal undervotes. (In an undervote, nobody gets the vote.) In fact, undervotes decreased by over 50% in all Florida touchscreen counites except Broward. The experience of Mahoning County in Ohio, which used ES&S Ivotronic touchscreen machines, is a good comparison. In Mahoning, EIRS reports of switching include many affidavits. The majority of machines defaulted to Bush, but some defaulted to "blank" (an undervote). Thus voters for Kerry, who chose Kerry but didn’t notice that the vote later switched to Bush, would end up either voting for Bush or "blank" (an undervote), depending upon the machine default. Kerry would lose all of these votes, but the pattern of undervotes would not look so unusual. The default to blank might also be considered less suspicious than the "Default to Bush" pattern and would be less likely to get reported through the hotline system (which most voters were not familiar with — many disasterous irregularities were never reported). A focused search of the Florida EIRS data has confirmed the same pattern also exists in Florida, especially Broward County. Several computers defaulted to blank after Kerry was initially chosen, as seen in the EIRS cases.

The EIRS cases for each county reported here are based on a limited search of the thousands of incident reports, and it is likely that these are just a small fraction of the total number of incidents.

These documented cases of vote-switching prove that the "Default to Bush" was programed into a number of the touchscreen vote machines of the big touchscreen counties. Computers don’t consistently do something unless they are programed to do it. This appears to explain the big gap between the exit polls and final vote counts in the big touchscreen counties. The exit polls appear to have been correct, just as they matched the final vote counts in all the non-touchscreen counties. The only questions are, Who was responsible? and What can we do about it?

My previous study examined Presidential votes by county in 2000 and new registrations by party from 2000 to 2004. It pointed out an ususual swing to Bush inconsistent with previous voting patterns and new voter registrationsin these counties.

This vote machine fraud pattern is consistent with the unusual shift to Republican candidates, which is documented by several detailed studies of voting and registration patterns, along with the exit poll data that also documented this unusual and unexplained shift in the official votes.

links here
http://www.flcv.com/fraudpat.html

Election Protection has announced a pair of additional election fraud hearings in peninsular Florida over and above the one at
Orlando City Hall at 6PM on Thursday, January 27.
Here’s the appropriate excerpt from their announcement:

North Florida - February 1
6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
St. James Building
Renaissance Room
(on the 1st floor)
117 W. Duval Street
Jacksonville, FL

South Florida - February 3
6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
United Teachers of Dade Building
2200 Biscayne Blvd.
Miami, FL

For more information, contact:
Irma Palacios - (305) 573-7329
or
Linda Morris - (850) 877-0307