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7 April 2005
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Nederlandstalig
This article is part of the series E-voting.
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Scientific analysis of the elections in the U.S.A.
Voting results possibly manipulated

Door Daan de Wit
This article has been translated from Dutch by Tim Pastoor.


Scientific analysis shows a statistically unexplainable large gap between the results of the American presidential elections and the exit polls. 'Scientific Analysis Suggests Presidential Vote Counts May Have Been Altered', concludes US Counts Votes in reference to the report (PDF) 'Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Poll Discrepancies'. The report was written by the National Election Data Archive Project, consisting of a large number of competent professors.

Exit polls are usually known for their accuracy and are therefore also used to indicate the value of the results. Exit polls have been used to verify the integrity of elections in the Ukraine, in Latin America, in Germany and elsewhere. Yet in November 2004, the U.S. exit poll discrepancy was much more than normal exit poll error (and similar to that of the invalid election). In the U.S. the difference amounted to between 5.5% and 6.5%. 'Either something was wrong with the exit polling, or something was wrong with the vote count'. Conducting exit polls is a near-science, but voting is definitely not: there were more than 28,000 problems that were made note of in the last American elections. Besides that there were another 400,000 reports made on a phone line.

Impossible voting discrepancies always end up good for Bush
In February magazine Vanity Fair talked to an anonymous insider  from a voting machine manufacturer: 'I asked her, finally, what would be the logical grounds for deducing that any tampering had in fact occurred.' Well, I understand from what I have read," she said, 'that the early exit polls on the day were believed by both parties.' That, I was able to tell her from direct experience, was indeed true. But it wasn't quite enough, either. So I asked, "What if all the anomalies and malfunctions, to give them a neutral name, were distributed along one axis of consistency: in other words, that they kept on disadvantaging only one candidate?" My question was hypothetical, as she had made no particular study of Ohio, but she replied at once: "Then that would be quite serious."'

Bush president, but: Voting result is unreliable
University professor Ron Baiman already wrote an analysis last year based on the exit poll data. 'I conclude that, based on the best exit sample data currently available, neither the national popular vote, or many of the certified state election results, are credible and should not be regarded as a true reflection of the intent of national electorate, or of many state voters [...]'. He calculated in many different ways how hugely improbable it is that the results now known could be right.

The whole story is too little, too late. It doesn't matter anymore and it makes no sense to worry about it.

Last month Noam Chomsky wrote: 'Why don't people care if the election is stolen? The reason is that they don?t take the election seriously in the first place?. Nevertheless DeepJournal will keep reporting on this problem in order to contribute to the prevention of it.

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