Tuesday, December 07, 2004

More post-election news. Wired has a couple of articles. First, it seems that there has been a falling out between the Democratic Underground and Bev Harris. Most of the theories about voter fraud started with Bev.

In a written statement, site administrators said Friday that they barred Bev Harris, founder of Black Box Voting, because her postings on the site "have made positive discussion of verified voting increasingly difficult'

Democratic Underground said Harris' postings have been belligerent at times to other members of the forum and that she used the website to threaten its operators with lawsuits.

"We no longer believe that it is productive to allow her to use DU as a platform to promote herself while simultaneously trashing us, our moderators and others who have been previously supportive of her cause," site administrators wrote in the statement.


Remember that MSNBC's Olbermann also stopped getting along with Bev last week.

The other Wired article is about the Berkley study showing that Bush got too many votes on electronic voting machines. It turns out that the study was done by grad students who had no idea what they were doing.

"What they did with their model is wrong, and their results are flawed," McCullough said. "They claim those results have some meaning, but I don't know how they can do that."

McCullough said they focused on one statistical model to conduct their analysis while ignoring other statistical models that would have produced opposite results.

"They either overlooked or did not bother to find a much better-fitting (statistical) regression model that showed that e-voting didn't account (for the voting anomalies)," McCullough said.

In other election news:

An exhaustive investigation has turned up a link between current Florida Republican Representative Tom Feeney, a customized Windows-based program to suppress Democratic votes on touch screen voting machines, a Florida computer services company with whom Feeney worked as a general counsel and registered lobbyist while he was Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, and top level officials of the Bush administration
According to Curtis, Feeney and other top brass at Yang Enterprises, a company located in a three-story building in Oviedo, Florida, wanted the prototype written in Visual Basic 5 (VB.5) in Microsoft Windows and the end-product designed to be portable across different Unix-based vote tabulation systems and to be "undetectable" to voters and election supervisors.
This is wild enough that even Bev Harris doesn't believe it. Among other things, programming in Visual Basic is nothing like programming in Unix. (BTW, Bev Harris's original issue with voting software was that it runs on Windows.)

The story is lacking links between the programmer and any voting machine companies (who could certainly write their own programs). The biggest bit of proof is a fake check (really).

Yet another fake conspiracy story is related by Dave Shuster, MSNBC's hardblogger:

Today, I was presented with an e-mail bouncing all over the Internet from somebody identifying himself/herself as Brad Menfil. Menfil writes, "I work for the RNC. I fear reprisals if I'm found out." Menfil alleges that "Florida and Ohio had to go for Bush in order for him to win the election... in reality, he lost both states. In fact, he did not even win the popular vote. He lost the national popular vote by at least 1,750,000. This shows you the scale of the fraud."
After deconstructing the facts presented, Shuster ends with:

The fact is, Brad Menfil, or whatever his/her real name is... is a self absorbed and sick punk. Menfil only seems to care about making an argument, not about proving one. There are some thoughtful discussions and honest investigations into the troubling election "irregularities." Let's not allow those to get shoved aside or replaced because of quacks like this.







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